# This Revolution Will Be Tokenized

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [215]. 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/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: document (Web page), 2017-10-18 (from the career record), https://www.forbes.com/sites/rahulsingireddy/2017/10/18/this-revolution-will-be-tokenized/. Text: document text
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Biographical profile linking crypto and disaster work.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Forbes (2017): Forbes interview on why Ethereum is the future.
  - The Future We Deserve: "Facebook for the Five Billion?" (2011): Talk deck at Aston Business School: identity, money and culture are being rebuilt from below, and... (suggested by machine)
  - Dangerous Old Men: Cypherpunk's Failure, Ethereum's Success (2015): Talk at Devcon 1, the Ethereum developer conference in London, on why cypherpunk failed and Ethereum... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: gupta / vinay / blockchain (50%); Hexayurt shelter design & project — hexayurt, hexayurt project, project (25%); Ethereum — launch, release process & programmable blockchains (25%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: e-gold (9 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Cypherpunks (5 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); PGP (3 here; 16 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Chaum (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); cypherpunk (3 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Scotland (3 here; 29 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); hashcash (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); Forbes (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); Julian Assange (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); cyber (2 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2009)
- Importance: core-text score 0.18 (1.00 is the top), number 381 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [768] [#03 - Vinay Gupta : History of Money, Foundations of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/768.md): close in content (cosine 0.87)
  - [206] [Vinay Gupta's Big Idea: An Identity Layer for Your Things (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/206.md): close in content (cosine 0.87)
- On the same works, just before: [266] ["Blockchain: IoT's trust broker?" talk on the fly by... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/266.md); [917] [Blockchain keynote - Vinay Gupta (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/917.md); [211] [Digital Catapult welcomes Vinay Gupta as Blockchain... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/211.md)
- On the same works, just after: [638] Ian Grigg - Internet of Agreements conference (2017); [650] Interview with Ian Grigg - Internet of Agreements (2017); [651] Interview with Namayi Daxit - Internet of Agreements (2017)

## 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: This Revolution Will Be Tokenized, document, 2017-10-18, https://www.forbes.com/sites/rahulsingireddy/2017/10/18/this-revolution-will-be-tokenized/; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [215], https://guptaoption.com/texts/215.md.

## Passages
[passage 1](https://www.forbes.com/sites/rahulsingireddy/2017/10/18/this-revolution-will-be-tokenized/) Log In share Trending Digital Money #CuttingEdge Digital Money #CuttingEdge Oct 18, 2017 @ 03:35 PM This Revolution Will Be Tokenized Rahul Singireddy , Contributor I am a Stanford senior profiling the leading names in crypto. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Rob Knight Vinay Gupta in London Vinay Gupta has followed cryptocurrency on its journey to the mainstream, aiding in disaster relief, picking up a meditation practice, and going to one too many Burning Mans on the way. T his post was written in collaboration with Richard Muirhead of OpenOcean . “Let's see, I'm 45, and this is probably career number five.” Vinay Gupta has not raised $257 million in an ICO. He is by no means a Bitcoin billionaire. He is not a Thiel Fellow , nor a Thiel Lad (to translate to his native Scottish vernacular). With Bitcoin reaching new highs monthly, the dominating headlines often miss the point of cryptocurrency because it was never about the money. Future thinking has a way of not always translating into dollar amounts. And Gupta has been doing a lot of thinking over the years, with only one metric to show for it - 136,000 tweets . Before the dawn of crypto hedge funds and ethtraders, before the blockchain technology existed, before 23-year-old Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin was born, Gupta was witnessing the ideological foundations of cryptocurrencies brewing and marinating. The interdisciplinary nature of cryptocurrencies means it has drawn from a variety of schools of thought: game theory, cryptography, hacker culture, the open source movement and libertarian ideology to name a few. Unlike many of the ambitious young founders that dominate the future of the space “running around with their hair on fire,” as he says, Gupta is part of the older guard. He was born in 1972 in Scotland, growing up as he describes it in a very average Scottish household. His father came from India in the late 60’s but later settled in Scotland as a doctor. His mother was a Scottish nurse. When he was 13, he started getting into Computer Science and doing a ton of academic reading. By the time he was in university he hit the ground running majoring in Graphics. It was there that Gupta heard his first whispers of this idea called the World Wide Web. “I was in university, you know,” Gupta said. “Software was kicking around, I installed it, set up. Just like everyone else. Look, there's the web! It started with academics and military, and government. And slowly people began to learn how to use this new thing. In those days there was no search, there was only discovery, so you'd have to try and click around until you found something that you wanted to know. Credit card processing hadn’t been invented, so you couldn't make any money online. There were no ads because no one could buy anything. I remember getting the first piece of spam. Some elite lawyer spammed half the Internet with some kind

[passage 2](https://www.forbes.com/sites/rahulsingireddy/2017/10/18/this-revolution-will-be-tokenized/) only discovery, so you'd have to try and click around until you found something that you wanted to know. Credit card processing hadn’t been invented, so you couldn't make any money online. There were no ads because no one could buy anything. I remember getting the first piece of spam. Some elite lawyer spammed half the Internet with some kind of green card thing. And like the whole Internet got the same piece of spam.” It was from the Internet that Gupta first heard about a festival called Burning Man. “In those days, more or less everyone knew more or less everything that was happening on the Internet all at the same time,” Gupta said. “There was no sense that the Internet was too big to understand. There just wasn't that much stuff there.” In 1996 , Gupta went to his first Burn. There were 8000 people in attendance, with no street signs and a theme of corporate takeover. It was very wild and very weird to the kid from rural Scotland, but he liked it. Gupta kept coming back for ten years. “It was Burning Man. It was just the staggering, the amazing, the Burning Man. The Burn!” During this time, Gupta was an early adopter of the first popular digital currency: E-Gold . E-gold, brought down in 2009 by regulators, shared many similarities to Bitcoin ideologically. Oncologist Douglas Jackson founded E-Gold in 1996, convinced of the fact that gold was superior to paper money and frustrated with the United States’ dismissal of the gold standard in 1971. He envisioned a new monetary system that was not so reliant on banks, a private currency backed by gold that could cross borders. Despite being plagued by scams, blackmarket adopters, copycats, and problems of scale much like many cryptocurrencies today, E-Gold reached a peak of being backed by $85 million worth of gold reserves. Despite its failure, E-Gold offered a glimpse to anti-establishment individuals of a decentralized future. “For me, it was a civil liberties thing,” Gupta said. “I'm very well known for having strong political opinions. Unfortunately, they change over time. So in those days I was probably in the early stages of being a naive libertarian, and this idea of free trade, everyone can decide what they want, la la la la, all of that stuff made perfect sense to me at the time, because I was 25, and I didn't know any better.” While E-Gold was rising and falling, cryptography, open source, and hacker culture were also rapidly evolving. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) was released in 1991 by Phil Zimmerman, providing increased encryption through the use of hashing, public and private keys, and data compression. Zimmerman released PGP in violation of patent law, wanting it to be open and for the people. “It was a huge topic of discourse on the Internet at the time, because it was this thing that people said would change the world one day,” Gupta said. “We expected it to be done in

[passage 3](https://www.forbes.com/sites/rahulsingireddy/2017/10/18/this-revolution-will-be-tokenized/) public and private keys, and data compression. Zimmerman released PGP in violation of patent law, wanting it to be open and for the people. “It was a huge topic of discourse on the Internet at the time, because it was this thing that people said would change the world one day,” Gupta said. “We expected it to be done in 5 years; 20 years later we're still waiting.” In 1997, Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar was published, with 19 lessons for good open source development. In 1998 on April Fool’s Day, hackers rejoiced as the MIT homepage was replaced with a new page that announced Disney’s acquisition of the university. Of particular importance to cryptocurrency was the Cypherpunk mailing list, which Gupta was a part of. Founded in 1992, the list hosted futuristic technology discussion about a wide range of subjects, and had nearly 2000 members in 1997 with an average of 30 messages sent every day. “There’s this genre of literary fiction, called Cyber Punk. Cypherpunks came along, looked at Cyber Punk, and basically took that science fiction as a manifesto,” Gupta said. “The Cypherpunk future was this kind of doom laden, corporate takeover, bad governance, environmentally polluting future. Which turns out to be more or less exactly where we are now. It's really predictive. You see people who have been into war in Iraq and Afghanistan with these very high tech artificial limbs, and it's kind of like that's sort of what they were talking about 40 years ago. We really are headed into a world that resembles that fiction.” The Cypherpunks were a crypto Fight Club of sorts. In the Andreessen Horowitz podcast, “Why Crypto Tokens Matter” , a16z partner Chris Dixon and Fred Ehrsam of Coinbase compare crypto to “the side of the nights and weekends.” They believe that what employees read about after 9-5, what smart people tinker with on the weekend, what researchers are pushing the boundaries of, is what everyone else will be working on in ten years. The Cypherpunks spread local chapters in London, Boston, and Washington. In addition to notorious figures like Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, many of the precursors to Bitcoin were created by Cypherpunks: Nick Szabo of Bit Gold, Adam Back of Hashcash, Wei Dai of B Money, Hal Finney of RPow, and more loosely David Chaum of Digicash ( Banking on Bitcoin ). However, they were all a little too ahead of their time, unable to translate their ideology into a usable, scalable technology. Then, in 2008, the Bitcoin white paper was sent out on The Cryptography Mailing List by an anonymous Cypherpunk under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamato. Gupta saw Bitcoin in its early years but completely ignored it. “I was not interested in speculating or making money through speculating,” Gupta said. “I told all my friends if you want to make a lot of money buy some Bitcoin. I don’t think anybody did, but god damn it I told them. And I didn't really get

[passage 4](https://www.forbes.com/sites/rahulsingireddy/2017/10/18/this-revolution-will-be-tokenized/) Satoshi Nakamato. Gupta saw Bitcoin in its early years but completely ignored it. “I was not interested in speculating or making money through speculating,” Gupta said. “I told all my friends if you want to make a lot of money buy some Bitcoin. I don’t think anybody did, but god damn it I told them. And I didn't really get interested in it because I knew from the E-Gold community that payments weren't enough. E-gold had payments and it didn't create any kind of new social structure.” Even now, compared to E-gold, Bitcoin has more volatility and higher transaction fees. It is unclear if Bitcoin can scale to the number of transactions that a network like Visa has. Yet at over $5000 a pop today, it is crazy to think that even extremely knowledgeable cryptography insiders did not benefit as much from Bitcoin as later players to the game. Though there are thousands of Bitcoin millionaires, there are millions of people who had every opportunity to invest but did not. “So in that sense I'm a bit of heretic inside the space in that I'm not sure that all of this stuff is actually progress,” Gupta said. “I think some projects are workarounds and maybe we just don't need those.” Gupta pivoted away from the Cypherpunks, immersing himself in other fields. He had careers in volume rendering and flight simulators, as well as defense. He picked up a heavy meditation practice after buying a book on the Internet written by an Australian named Paul Wilson called The Calm Technique . And soon he found himself involved in an unlikely field: disaster relief. Gupta’s biggest accomplishment to date is the design of the Hexayurt, a disaster relief tent that can be folded and transported. “A bunch of hippies asked me if I could figure out how to build a geodesic dome without waste. After I invented it I felt obligated to do something.”

---
End of [215] This Revolution Will Be Tokenized. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [638] Ian Grigg - Internet of Agreements conference (2017) (no text here); the most closely related, [768](https://guptaoption.com/texts/768.md) #03 - Vinay Gupta : History of Money, Foundations of... (2021); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.