Estate Planning Reimagined: From Step-Up Basis to Blockchain Governance

0:00 Welcome to Something More with Chris Boyd. Chris Boyd is a certified financial planner, practitioner, and senior vice president and financial advisor at Wealth Enhancement Group, one of the nation's largest registered investment advisors. We call it Something More because we'd like to talk not only about those important dollar and cents issues, but also the quality of life issues that make the money matters matter. Here he is, your fulfillment facilitator, your partner in prosperity, advising clients on Cape Cod and across the country. Here's your host, Jay Christopher Boyd. Welcome to the program. Thanks for being with us. I'm Chris Boyd, certified financial planner, practitioner here with Jeff Perry. We are both of the AMR team at Wealth Enhancement, and our guest is recurring guest, my brother, F.

0:46 Keats Boyd. He is the third. He is a principal at Boyd & Boyd, well-known for estate planning. Estate planning is for financial planners an essential topic of conversation as we think about trying to look at a variety of things that our clients need to consider as they look at their tax planning, their investment planning, their insurance, and so forth. Estate planning becomes one of those really big topics and lots of nuance. Today, we're going to talk not only about some basic and important estate planning considerations, but we're also going to be bringing in some of the cutting edge, what's happening, and why don't we start, Keats, I know it's seminar season.

1:36 I see you have your seminar schedule in front of you. Maybe we want to mention that to anyone who's interested in just learning a little bit about estate planning. I'm reluctant to say it's the basics because you get into some really important and dynamic components of things for people to think about in their estate planning that's not very basic. These seminars for people who haven't been, they're entirely educational. It is an opportunity to really get a grasp of the issues of what do I need to be thinking about?

2:18 Who are the players? Who do I need to be thinking about to fill what roles? What kind of concerns that I have? We think of sometimes estate planning as the practice of who's going to get my stuff when I'm gone. It's a lot more than that. It's really more importantly about you in the process for many of the decisions and the concerns we think about and the structures, the tools that you can help people have to utilize to make sure that they have things working for them while they're alive the way they want and for their distribution of wealth subsequently how they want.

3:00 Let's tell a little bit about when these seminars and where they are. It's local to Cape Cod. This is really about how to make sure that the brand new tax law that went into effect, it was signed on July 4th, many of the features go into effect next year. You want to make sure your estate plan is properly reflecting the opportunities that this new law provides. We've got some seminars set up. We actually started on the 10th and we've got more on the 16th, 17th, 23rd, and 24th of September of 2025. We're going to be able to just provide some good education, talk about really the shift away from estate tax avoidance while it's still an issue for people who reside in the few states that still have an estate tax like Massachusetts.

3:55 We're more concerned about making sure the estate plan does proper income tax avoidance planning, getting the most step up in basis as possible whenever we can, looking to make sure that the trusts and the wills that we're using will minimize the income tax impact because very often most structures are set up to have a very high income tax. You're in the highest bracket at a very low tax rate, a very low income amount. So we want to make sure that we're at a low threshold of income. Suddenly you're into a very high tax rate. And so what we're trying to do is restructure it so that we're looking through to the beneficiary to make sure that it's the beneficiary's tax rate we're paying, not the separate trust tax rate.

4:40 That can be very high. So there's a lot of things like that. We'll want to make sure we're dealing with asset protection. What we find is most people think of estate planning as a once and done event. I go and see my lawyer once every 10 years. I maybe update my will or update a trust, but I don't really need to do much else. And it's really a process. You know this with financial planning. You're constantly updating and tweaking, revisiting the investment portfolio to make sure that things change, decisions are being considered. Oh, we're thinking of buying that other house. We might relocate or whatever. And many people are still thinking, oh, I just need a will.

5:25 And surprisingly, that's not really the case. You really need to be doing something more. The problem with a will and traditional estate planning is you gather up your wealth during your lifetime. And then when you pass away, you're really using an upside down funnel. You take your wealth and you're spreading it out amongst a bunch of people. Some of it goes to the government, some of it goes to your dad, some of it goes to the attorneys, some of it goes to your family, some of it might go to charity. It's going off in all these different places. And your family, there's lots of different people. And so it's getting chopped up and smaller and smaller. So we're spreading out that wealth so it's not as effective.

6:05 A good estate plan will take that funnel and turn it right side up so that we're keeping that wealth concentrated and controlling it and using tools like vehicles for family governance, a family constitution effectively to say, here's what we as a family want to have this wealth do and achieve to borrow off the Rockefeller model rather than using other models that just let the wealth be dissipated. And so a lot of that structure is done through a revocable trust as the centerpiece of the plan, but then you supplement it with things like legacy letters. Hey, the trust gives the legal stuff, but here's the value set that I hope you'll use with my wealth.

6:49 Yeah, I think that's overlooked a lot. It is. And so that's something that we're putting an emphasis on with our clients. And then as I mentioned, the idea of a family constitution, some mechanism to make sure that there are rules for family governance, that as things change that we don't anticipate today, your plan can be flexible and deal with those changes. I just want to be clear. It sounds like you're saying something a little different than I've heard in the past, and that is the idea that I have wealth and I want to pass it on to my heirs, my children primarily. Granted, there may be other hands out in the process with taxes and administrative concerns.

7:34 You sound like you're saying to retain that in a single location, a trust or perhaps or some kind of corporate entity, not to disseminate that to the different parties. I'm thinking that sounds like a recipe for conflict. Is this- Concentrate it and not disperse it out. I think the big difference is a preposition that our dad used to talk about. You give it for your family, not to your family. And so using a trust that's built to retain the wealth, it's not to say that we don't want the kids to use and enjoy it.

8:18 That's not the goal. The goal is to make sure that- It's not to prevent that. Yeah. We want to make sure that they're getting the benefit of the gift that you're leaving the kids, that they can decide how to invest, for example, their portion of the inheritance. We're not trying to take that away. So their portion of the inheritance, they still control their piece of it. Their portion, right. The difference is really understanding that ownership, property rights are analogized to a bundle of sticks. Jeff, you may remember this. If I own a piece of land, when I own it outright, I got the whole bundle of sticks.

9:01 That might be the right to take crops off the land. That might be the right to live on a house that's on the land. That might be the right to dig out minerals from the land. It might be the right to sell the land in its entirety. It might be the right to retain the right to live there, but sell the remainder interest. It's all different rights that are one big bundle. What we're trying to do with a good estate plan these days is to say to the kids, here's the entire bundle of sticks except one stick. We're going to keep the ownership stick in the trust set up by mom and dad. So mom and dad's trust will own it. You can do everything else with it.

9:42 And why is that desirable? Okay. Because if you own all the bundle of sticks and I sue you for some reason, I can take away some or all of the sticks. But if I don't own the sticks, you have a harder time taking those from me. Right. I can't take the ownership away because I may sue you, but I'm not suing mom and dad's trust. Mom and dad's trust didn't get into a car accident. Mom and dad's trust didn't have some negligent act. Didn't have an employment disagreement. So there's value in having that protection in effect. That's right. And so- So I still can control it all.

10:23 I can have the benefit of it and enjoyment of those resources without the liability of the risk- The risk of loss that someone can take it away from you. Right? Okay. And so what we're trying to do is keep it concentrated in mom and dad's trust and then supplement that or compliment it with family governance documents, whether that be an LLC or in the new technology world, right? Yeah, it's a business entity. And so effectively in some cases, let's say that mom and dad have a home here on the Cape and they want the kids and grandkids to keep the home and use it for multiple generations, right?

11:10 Haven't seen that. What are we doing? We're putting our kids into a business relationship. We may not think of it that way, but we're forcing our kids to be partners in the ownership of this home. And we need to set up a business structure to allow the kids to properly manage that, to say, hey, you as the owners, you may need to contribute to do a renovation. If we decide we can rent the property out and use the rent to pay for some of these expenses, or maybe we're all going to take turns. But now if one of the kids moves to California and we're forced to stay in this business relationship, what's going- What's fair?

11:52 What's equitable? How do we manage that? What if my finances require that I can't afford to maintain this relationship and I need to sell- And other family members pick out what happens. No, I like to stay there. I don't want to sell. Right. Now what do we do? Right. And that can be handled through a business structure like a limited liability company. LLCs are great because they are the simplest of business structures if you're going to get into a formalized business relationship, right? That doesn't have a lot of formalities to deal with. Annual meeting or whatever. You don't have to have officers and elections and corporate resolutions and all this other stuff that keep the lawyers busy if we use a corporation, right?

12:34 Corporations are great if you're a lawyer because you've got lots of work that you need to do. Not so great if you're the business owner who just wants to do the business of managing the real estate, right? And so LLCs are a great tool for people who are- Families in that circumstance. Yeah. They're really good at whatever their business is, but not great at the formalities. All right. So LLCs, trusts, things like that. And now with the advent of blockchain technology, there's another opportunity for family governance called a decentralized autonomous organization. Hold that thought. Okay.

13:15 Let's wrap up the mention of the more familiar type of estate planning that you'll be talking about at the seminars and share where those are going to be or how people can register before we go on to- All right. Great. So yeah, if you're interested in learning about just general estate planning devices, wills, trust, powers of attorney, healthcare proxies, living wills, how they all interplay with each other, how they handle incapacity care planning, how they handle passing wealth to death, how they handle taxes and asset protection. And you'll touch on things like the LLC and things like that as well. Yeah. Exactly. So again, they are at the Wauquoset Resort on Tuesday, September 16th at 10 in the morning.

13:57 These are all at 10 in the morning, by the way. Wauquoset, Tuesday, September 16th. The Courtyard by Marriott in Hyannis on Wednesday, September 17th. The Daniel Webster in Sandwich on Tuesday, the 23rd. And finally, the Windsor House in Duxbury on Wednesday, September 24th. And to register, it's a really easy URL. You can go to www.ursvp.com. So that's the word, U-Y-O-U -R-S-V-P.com. And enter a code C-E-G-B -U-S, or you can call our office at 508-775-7800 and just tell somebody that you'd like to register for the upcoming seminars.

14:44 We just need to know how many people are going to be there. And they'll help you figure out which one's the best time and location for your availability. So that number again is 508-775-7800. All right. That's what you'll be talking about at the seminars. Now we want to talk about an evolution. There is a new technology people may want to know about, be familiar with, and maybe start to gravitate towards this making use of a blockchain technology. And what did you say? Decentralized? Decentralized autonomous organizations, DAOs.

15:26 Some people say DAOs. It's a business entity that is used primarily in blockchain technology for managing a blockchain. Okay. This is going to sound confusing to people. What's blockchain? We've heard the term primarily in the context of cryptocurrency, but that's not the only use of the blockchain. Blockchain is a technology. In a sense, it is not necessarily tied to cryptocurrencies. Historically, it's been, we're all familiar with because of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

16:06 If you've followed that type of cryptocurrency at all, that is where this was first developed. To me, it's taken a distracting side turn into NFTs, non-fungible tokens for lions and apes and silly things. The real beauty of this technology is it is effectively a ledger that has a permanent record of transactions. Think of- A registry of deeds of sorts. Effectively, yeah. Or with stocks, the transfer agent keeps a record of who owns stocks.

16:50 Who gets what shares, where do those shares go? And who gets the dividend. So we're keeping these kinds of records on paper. We can keep these kinds of records on a blockchain that can be anonymized. So if you're looking for privacy, there's a way to do it so that- If a number represents it instead of- A number represents you, right. And that number is frequently referred to as a wallet. So I keep my cryptocurrency in a wallet, like I keep my dollar bills in the wallet in my back pocket. And the wallet has an identifying number that says, that wallet belongs to me.

17:34 That sounds scary if I were to have my estate plan somehow anonymized in the sense of this wallet because people get concerned. I've heard stories about wallets being lost. Right. And in the case of cryptocurrency, the access to their wealth that's tied to that cryptocurrency, inaccessible. Is this something that is typically expected, the idea, not the loss of that, but the idea of anonymizing one's wealth that is essentially tied to the blockchain? I think the ability to keep it anonymous if somebody wants that is desirable.

18:16 A lot of people like the idea of privacy. In fact, that's one of the reasons many people choose to have a revocable trust over using a will. A will becomes a matter of public record. The assets going through the estate can become a matter of public record. And that loss of privacy is undesirable to most families. You don't want the nosy neighbor next door being able to just run down to the probate court and say, hey, I'd like to see the probate estate for Jacqueline open it up. And there's all her financial affairs right there in black and white. So a trust helps avoid that. We can use blockchain technology to do the same kind of a thing, to keep things private, to say, hey, I have a desire to give my stuff to this person or that person.

19:05 And I don't need anybody else to know who's getting it. Now, that doesn't eliminate the need to file estate tax returns and disclose information to government entities when we're required to. It simply means that it's not necessarily going to be a matter of public record. And it's something that we can structure in a way that maintains family privacy. No doubt people might hear this and say, well, why would I want to do this? Why would I want, instead of a more traditional means of transferring wealth from one generation to the next or whatever, tell about the virtues of why this is designed. So traditionally, when we use a will-based estate plan, a probate's going to last anywhere from a year to a year and a half.

19:50 In Massachusetts, one year is mandated by statute. We can't close a regular probate until that one-year timeframe is over. So we've baked into the cake a delay for your family to get their money. If we use a revocable trust, we're often dealing with a similar delay. Now, if it's a smaller estate where there's no estate tax return required, sometimes we can wrap those up relatively quickly. I'm going to say six months. But that's still a delay. Wouldn't you like a system where within 30 days, everybody can get whatever they're entitled to?

20:32 Quite frankly, we could make it virtually instantly once certain criteria are met, that wealth could transfer from the deceased to the heirs, lickety -split. But I think it would be wise to put a little bit of a delay in there so the system that we're building has a 30-day delay, so that if there is fraud, we have a way of stopping the transfer to someone who's not supposed to receive advance. So we've built a 30-day delay in there, but it could be instantaneous that estate taxes are calculated and paid, income taxes are calculated and paid, debts of the decedent are calculated and paid, and the heirs get their wealth, perhaps with a small reserve, and then we go from there.

21:22 So speed is the big advantage here, but it's not the only advantage. I thought that was one of the reasons I used a trust. Doesn't that happen faster than a probate? Yes, but the difference is this. So once a death occurs with a trust, the new beneficiaries, the kids, step up into the place to be the beneficiary, so they're able to have access to things. But the reality is, when we're settling an estate, there's really five steps that we're going to go through. We have to take an inventory. What did somebody know? I'm sorry, what did somebody own?

22:04 With blockchain technology, that's already on record, so we don't have to do a new inventory. So if there was something that wasn't recorded as part of the blockchain, then that still remains a probate issue. Or some other method of passing wealth. But if it's on there, it could be instant. We have to get appraisals. What was it worth? Well, real estate, we have to go out and get a paid appraisal. It slows things down a little bit. That can take several weeks to get. If it's stocks, there's a process for that, but basically, the day after that, information is available.

22:44 So there's a number of steps that need to be taken. Inventory appraise, we got to retitle, take the decedent's name off, transfer to the successor trustee who will eventually transfer to the heirs. We have to pay taxes, income taxes, and estate taxes, and then we divide and distribute. And to get through that process, if an estate tax return is required, we're probably going to be nine months to a year. So even with a trust, we're not going to get through the steps until we've done all those things. And it takes time to file the estate tax return, gather the data, fill out the form. Now we're reaching a point where much of that can be done through automation and can be tied to blockchain technologies to value and distribute.

23:33 Kate, sometimes when someone passes and they've kept their estate planning private, meaning just themselves sometimes, and they're an attorney, sometimes documents aren't readily available. No one knows where they are. There's issues of, well, there's two sets of documents, or there was a new set assigned, all these things that you deal with every day. I know the blockchain, you say the blockchain is private, but would it, in this example, if this individual put it in the blockchain, would the blockchain be searchable to see? Yeah. Did Mr. Jones have an estate plan or some documents on the blockchain?

24:14 There would be a couple of ways of dealing with that. So typically documents like wills or trust could be converted to a non-fungible token, a digital representation of the document, and that would be recorded somewhere on the blockchain so that there'll be access to it. It would be determinable. You'd probably need to know the wallet information. But again, assuming the family has some information about the wallet or the drafting attorney who assisted with this would have that information, then you'd be able to identify it quickly and get the NFT available to show what the plan actually was. So that's a benefit in itself.

24:56 Right, right. You talked about calculated and paid, right? Yeah. You said things like an estate tax or whatever. Part of what was the delay in the regular current process in a trust, for example, is the notion of valuations. What's my real estate worth? And that often requires an appraisal for me to get a calculation. There's a delay in that process.

25:37 How will you navigate that kind of an issue with the notion of that transference, that conveyance of transfer of ownership? There's a couple of ways. Some of them are available. Some of them aren't yet, but will be in the not too distant future. With the advent of AI, it is very possible to create an AI agent that will be able to do an appraisal. You just need to go out and find the comps. And so the technology isn't there yet, but it's probably right on the horizon.

26:21 The other option would be to memorialize the real estate ownership as a non-fungible token. There are some technologies out there that do this with stocks right now. And you could then see what that NFT is trading at as it's assessed value in a sense. So if I understand that correctly, essentially I would say the ownership of my property that I own here now is connected to this non-fungible token. And if I wanted to transfer the ownership of that, I would be selling in effect this non-fungible token which owns this real estate as a means of transferring ownership.

27:15 And therefore, there's a potential for a market of sorts for assets like that. And you think that's likely to be the way some of this is happening in the not too distant future. Yes. Okay. And very interesting. Very interesting. Yeah. So the question is going to be, where do you want record of your real estate ownership to be at the county registry of deeds and books and pages on paper? Or do you want it to be more digital and there's going to be a competitive alternative solution for real estate for stocks and bonds instead of transfer agents?

27:56 Well, I bet you could name dozens of heirs that you are working with after the passing of their parents who presently expect this to be like, aren't we done? It's been a month. Yeah. Like every one of them, probably. And so the idea of moving this process to something more efficient, let's call it, would have great appeal if you're maybe automating, for lack of a better term, some of the process of how is this accomplished? Right. Sounds pretty appealing. Right.

28:36 Right. So now this... All right. So I'm someone who says, oh, this sounds interesting. I should do this. Is this doable today? We're on the cusp. We've submitted a patent for this process for what we're calling the Wealth Blockchain. So we're technically patent pending. Takes a little bit of time for that patent to come through. As far as the technology is concerned, we're probably about a month out from starting testing of transfers, artificial transfers. Should I think in terms of, hey, a year from now, this is going to be very different, or is it six months?

29:22 Is it 10 years? I think we're hoping to be... How quickly is this going to impact people? We're hoping to be live before the beginning of the year. Wow. So do you think... Now, most of our clientele and I know most of your clientele tend to be people who are in retirement, maybe an older set who are maybe a little more skeptical of this technology. It's unfamiliar. Who's the target audience for this kind of planning? Initially, the people who will be the first adopters of this approach will be people who are already active in the crypto field. Kind of cryptocurrency, familiar with blockchain technology already to some extent.

30:03 They'll get it and they'll understand the application, and so they'll be ready to adopt this relatively quickly. I think the next step for more broad adoption will be a hybrid approach where we still have traditional estate planning documents that control some of the assets, and we digitize other portions of the estate to be controlled by blockchain while transfer process. So that will probably be the next stage. And with final adoption, I'd say within five years, this could replace traditional estate planning. Really interesting. I wanted to ask you about another element of this, and that is when we talk about trust, typically we kind of hit a fork in the road, and we think in terms of two different approaches to the estate planning.

30:48 One that's intended to shelter wealth that is essentially giving it away prematurely before I have a long-term care event, a Medicaid need, and where that might take it out of my access. And one that's more designed to plan for taxation and some of the kind of things you were talking about earlier. How does this technology fit into the prism of this kind of approach? In order to answer that, I have to step back for a second just to explain kind of some of what we're doing with the technology. All right. So when you look at a trust, that is essentially a contract, an agreement amongst three parties.

31:36 The person who's making the trust, the donor, settler, grantor, trustee, trustor, whoever, whatever terminology you want to use. The person who will manage the assets that are owned by the trust, a trustee, and the person who gets to use and enjoy the assets, the beneficiary. Yes. Will's technically aren't necessarily contracts, but they are contractual in nature as well. I'm going to put down on paper who's going to get my stuff when I die, and my executor's going to oversee it and make sure it happens. But the court has to approve the process, which is kind of the difference. Right. Okay. So what we're doing with this technology is recognizing the fact that there is something called a smart contract in certain portions of the blockchain world.

32:17 Ethereum initially, Solana is another one that you can put an agreement that says- If this, then that. Right. Yeah. Basically. My wallet is going to transfer X amount of Ethereum because Joe Blow mows my lawn. And when the certification comes through that he's completed the job, go ahead and move the Ethereum from my wallet to Joe Blow's wallet. Well, that's a trust by another name, effectively. It's a contract to transfer wealth from one person to another when a certain event occurs, in this case, a death, or can transfer control from the owner to the next person who's going to be in control if there's an incapacity.

33:04 So we can put certifications onto the blockchain, an affidavit through an NFT that says the person has died. Here's a copy of the death certificate. We can verify that through records, through social security administration, for example, to show that yes, social security shows the person has passed away. So we come at it from multiple sources to confirm that the death has occurred. And now we know, okay, it's okay to transfer the wealth from the first person to the second person. Okay. Again, we're going to build this with similar types of trust feel to it. We can make it a smart will. When I die as certified by a couple of instances, then take my stuff and give it to so-and-so, my spouse, my kids, my favorite charity.

33:51 Okay. And then the wealth is transferred to the ultimate beneficiary and it's done. We can build it like a trust that is for someone. Give it to a wallet that is managed by a trustee for the benefit of the ultimate beneficiary. And the trustee will decide how to dish it out to that beneficiary based on pre -designed parameters. You can say, give them the income every month. Give them principal for health education, maintenance, and support. Give them principal at your discretion. And again, the trustee in that situation, it'll move from the wallet of the deceased to a wallet of the trustee who will hold it in trust for the ultimate beneficiary, much like a revocable trust does now, but it happens automatically because it's on this blockchain technology.

34:41 It is possible to let the smart contract act like the trustee itself to actually dish things out. Make decisions. Make decisions. Yeah. As to when to distribute on certain, again, certain parameters that are predefined and recorded on the blockchain. What if we haven't thought of something? And that's where there are safety nets that you can put in. I mentioned a decentralized autonomous organization a few moments ago. Initially, that's going to be the easy way to accomplish this. You put your assets into a business entity, a DAO.

35:22 You have the DAO subject to the contract. Well, now the DAO ownership changes, but so does the assets owned by the DAO. You can use an LLC the same way if you don't want it to be totally blockchain oriented and it transfers from the ownership of the membership of the LLC transfers at death from one person, one wallet to another wallet. And that manager of that LLC can act like the trustee to distribute out to the beneficiaries. A DAO basically allows the various owners to vote on things. And so it's managed in a more flexible nature because the owners can take into account things that we don't consider today.

36:09 So they can vote on liquidating the DAO if it makes more sense to do that. They can vote on making partial distributions because there's a need for one person to get some money. They can vote on changing the investment structure from a stock account to a bond account or whatever the nature might be. So it gives more of a democratic management structure than traditional business entities would provide. All right. You got all that, Jeff? I think my head exploded about five minutes ago, actually. I know. I think I lost him on that last part of managing the DAO stuff.

36:52 So there's obviously a lot of opportunity in blockchain technology and this is a small piece of those opportunities. I think for people maybe my age and older, they'll have some hesitancy because they don't understand it. They don't know how it works. They can't go into the office and talk to somebody. Well, they will be able to. Part of what we're doing is we're going to... So the blockchain, this is really, to me, it's a two-level approach to address planning. The first level is the blockchain and the smart contract. The second level will be a software application.

37:34 For the implementation. Yeah. And so most lawyers are not going to learn how to write a smart contract. They may know the law, but they're not going to know the technological programmatic portion of this. So a software application that the lawyer can subscribe to to say, okay, let's build a smart contract that works like a domestic asset protection trust or a spousal limited access trust or a Medicaid planning trust, they'll be predefined. That goes back to my prior question, I think, too. So it's going to come down to the programming that a legal expert might select as the mechanism to use to provide the instructions that are placed into the smart contract.

38:21 Right. And most lawyers right now, when they're doing estate planning, they use software to build the trust. Well, so what we're doing is we're changing it to be software to build a smart contract rather than software to build a trust, but the smart contract replaces the trust. But it's in many ways going to do a lot of the same kinds of things. It's going to act in a similar way. It's just moving it from paper, if you will, to digital. And then the application of the decision making is more efficient and rapid. Interesting stuff. So with every advance comes bad actors looking to take advantage of technology and try to figure out how to monetize in a bad way.

39:12 There's been some articles about the increases in technology regarding quantum computing and whether or not the ability of quantum computing will be able to threaten the blockchain and destroy that privacy or security of it. How would you respond to someone who's concerned about that? We have to be realistic. There is some risk that basically what blockchain is built on is the idea that we're using cryptography to provide security. As supercomputing comes online, I think it's going to be a double edged sword.

39:53 There will be bad actors out there who will try to use supercomputing to break the code, break the cryptography, and therefore gain access to things. I think though realistically, the idea of the cryptography, I'm sorry, cryptotechnology is built on a peer-to-peer network. You have a computer that is running programs. Chris has a computer that's running programs. I have a computer that's running programs. There's a thousand of these computers or thousands of them all over the world running and trying to break the code and solve a problem to say, yes, we all agree this is the answer.

40:41 When one bad actor comes in and says, hey, I've got a different answer, they're going to get boxed out because they've got the different answer. That's part of it. I think too, the idea of supercomputing is going to give us an opportunity to develop the cryptography to a higher level of security. I think both of these are sides that will provide adequate protection and comfort to everybody that eventually once we do have supercomputers online, we're going to be able to go to a much, much higher level of security in blockchain technology than we currently have. Just as there might be if we're just looking at it relative to today, that supercomputing capability might be able to undermine some of that cryptography.

41:28 But if we have the ability to use that for advancing the cryptography, it will be a much harder code to break. Again, then you still have that idea of the peer-to-peer network. Just for people who aren't computer geeks like I guess I am, a peer-to-peer network is a network where each computer can talk to all the other computers and each computer stores all the data on its own hard drive. Most commercial networks are built differently that there is a server that holds all the data and all the computers feed onto that server and pull the data off, do what they want to do and then put the data back on.

42:10 Peer-to-peer networks are something that we've been working with since we started using networks at Boyd & Boyd PC where every computer can talk to the other computers and the data isn't necessarily stored in one place, it's all over the place and that adds added security. My mind is going back to the music shared file program. What the heck was that? Yeah, that was a peer-to-peer network where everybody was sharing their music files, their mp3s. Granted, it did violate copyright but it was conceptual how it works essentially. All right, well, we're going to talk to you more about this in the future no doubt because it sounds like this is just at its early stages of adoption and really intriguing, interesting stuff.

43:03 In the meantime, don't hesitate to deal with your estate plan but be aware that there are really interesting possibilities evolving over time and may have some impact in the future as it relates to this. I think for those of families who are looking at doing a traditional estate plan and saying, well, is this new technology going to undo what I just did? It's going to be irrelevant. No, it's not. Will it replace it? Maybe someday but I think there will be people who will be hesitant to adopt it. So over our lifetimes, there's still going to be traditional estate planning. There's going to be traditional estate planning.

43:46 Once this technology is out there, you may be able to hybrid it but if you want to just work with your paper documents, that's going to work and it works well. We know it. It's been around since the 1500s. Yeah. Yeah. So again, if you want to learn more about those seminar dates, maybe send them to a web page. It's www.yoursvp.com and there's a code you can enter C-E-G-B-U -S and or call the office at 508 -775-7800. We hope you can join us for one of those. We try to share lots of good information. We'll include that link in the show notes so you'll be able to find that more easily.

44:31 And in the meantime, thanks everybody for being with us for another show. Until next time, keep striving for something more. Thank you for listening to Something More with Chris Boyd. Call us for help, whether it's for financial planning or portfolio management, insurance concerns, or those quality of life issues that make the money matters matter. Whatever's on your mind, visit us at somethingmorewithchrisboyd .com or call us toll free at 866 -771-8901, or send us your questions to amr-info at wealthenhancement.com. You're listening to Something More with Chris Boyd Financial Talk Show.

45:12 Wealth Enhancement Advisory Services and Jay Christopher Boyd provide investment advice on an individual basis to clients only. Proper advice depends on a complete analysis of all facts and circumstances. The information given on this program is general financial comments and cannot be relied upon as pertaining to your specific situation. Wealth Enhancement Group cannot guarantee that using the information from this show will generate profits or ensure freedom from loss. Listeners should consult their own financial advisors or conduct their own due diligence before making any financial decisions.