# Programmable blockchains in context: Ethereum’s Future – Medium (part 2 of 2) > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [164], part 2 of 2. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: document (Web page), 2015-10-21 (publication data), https://medium.com/consensys-media/programmable-blockchains-in-context-ethereum-s-future-cd8451eb421e. Text: document text - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015), before the law step (Mattereum, 2017). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Core explainer of Ethereum, the ledger under the contracting layer. - Career works it belongs to: - Ethereum launch (2015): Release coordinator for the July 2015 launch of Ethereum, the programmable blockchain. - Programmable Blockchains in Context (2015): The launch explainer for Ethereum: where programmable blockchains sit in the line from databases to the web. - People's Cloud architecture and futures in 1000 words (2013): Blog essay: the data center is doomed, its efficiency is bought with centralization and monitoring, and... (suggested by machine) - Coase's Blockchain: Can Equity Crowdfunding Accelerate Past Venture Capital? (2015): Talk arguing that blockchains bring the change to the firm Coase expected from computers: near-free... (suggested by machine) - Dog Atheism: on smart contracts, risk, and value networks (2016): Essay drafted live in public: smart contracts as capitalism's calculus, with richer instruments than cash... (suggested by machine) - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... - Ideas whose earliest source in this archive is this one: Programmable Blockchains in Context - Ideas developed here: Ethereum launch - Topics: Ethereum — launch, release process & programmable blockchains (100%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Mist (4 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); walled gardens (2 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); world computer (3 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Legalese (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); contracts (14 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); Mars (3 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); smart contracts (8 here; 110 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); Imogen Heap (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); semantic web (1 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Frontier (2 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2006) - The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): Legalese - Importance: core-text score 0.87 (1.00 is the top), number 6 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [113] [The Ethereum Launch Process | Ethereum Foundation Blog (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/113.md): Vinay: the two most developed Ethereum texts (launch process with FRONTIER and HOMESTEAD; Programmable Blockchains in Context) - [379] [Blockchains, databases, reification: are bottom up... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/379.md): same career work: Programmable Blockchains in Context - [783] [Vinay Gupta / DCxPrague (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/783.md): same career work: Ethereum launch - On the same works, just before: [298] [Raw footage of Transparent Society mic audio soon (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/298.md); [296] [Vinay Gupta - Transparent Society - Crowdfunding on... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/296.md); [757] [Vinay Gupta | Interview | State of the Net 2015 (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/757.md) - On the same works, just after: [695] [Vinay Gupta - Dangerous Old Men: cypherpunk's failure,... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/695.md); [242] [Dog Atheism: on smart contracts, risk, and value networks (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/242.md); [694] [EB114 – Vinay Gupta: From Lawyer Capitalism To... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/694.md) ## Reading it Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it. Cite as: Programmable blockchains in context: Ethereum’s Future – Medium, document, 2015-10-21, https://medium.com/consensys-media/programmable-blockchains-in-context-ethereum-s-future-cd8451eb421e; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [164], https://guptaoption.com/texts/164.md. ## Passages, part 2 of 2 [passage 14](https://medium.com/consensys-media/programmable-blockchains-in-context-ethereum-s-future-cd8451eb421e) simple agreements as free speech, as publication of an idea, and who knows where this leads. Ethereum Frontier is a first step: it’s a platform for programmers to build services you might access through a web browser or a phone app. Later we’ll release Ethereum Metropolis, which will be a web browser like program, currently called Mist, which takes all the security and cryptography inherent in Ethereum and packages it nicely with a user interface that anybody can use. The recent releases of Mist showcase a secure wallet, and that’s just the start. The security offered by Mist is far stronger than current e-commerce systems and phone apps have. In the medium term, contract production systems will be stand-alone, so nearly anybody can download a “distributed application builder” and load it up with their content and ideas and upload it — for simple things, no code will be required, but the full underlying power of the network will be available. Think along the lines of an installation wizard, but instead of setting up your printer, you are configuring the terms of a smart contract for a loan: how much money, how long, what repayment rates. Click OK to approve! If this sounds impossible, welcome to our challenge: the technology has gotten far, far ahead of our ability to explain or communicate the technology! The World SUPER Computer? We are not done innovating yet. In a little while — we’re talking a year or two — Ethereum Serenity will take the network to a whole new level. Right now, adding more computers to the Ethereum network makes it more secure, but not faster. We manage the limited speed of the network using Ether, a token which gives priority on the network etc. In the Serenity system, adding more computers to the network makes it faster, and this will finally allow us to build systems which really are internet scale: hundreds of millions of computers working together to do jobs we collectively need done. Today we might guess at protein folding or genomics or AI, but who’s to say what uses will be found for such brilliant software. I hope this non-technical primer on the Ethereum ecosystem has been useful, and as soon as we have a user friendly version of the system available for general use, you’ll be the first to know! If you are interested in learning more about Ethereum, you should come to https://devcon.ethereum.org in London on November 9th. by Vinay Gupta @leashless ConsenSys Layout by Eva Shon, along with icons from thenounproject.com --- End of [164] Programmable blockchains in context: Ethereum’s Future – Medium, part 2 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [695](https://guptaoption.com/texts/695.md) Vinay Gupta - Dangerous Old Men: cypherpunk's failure,... (2015); the most closely related, [113](https://guptaoption.com/texts/113.md) The Ethereum Launch Process | Ethereum Foundation Blog (2015); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.