# Coase’s Blockchain: Can Equity Crowdfunding Accelerate Past Venture Capital? (slides) > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [244]. 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 (Text), 2015 (from the career record), https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lE4FetnPPgN5NUnVQERzxYg8_VI4pZjlhWjNlCo_dXc/edit?usp=sharing. 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): Coase argument for cheap capital formation, the finance layer. - Career works it belongs to: - 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... - 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) - 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: - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine) - Ideas whose earliest source in this archive is this one: Coase's Blockchain - Topics: Coase — transaction costs and capital formation (100%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Coase (3 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 2 undated); equity crowdfunding (2 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); digital signatures (2 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); venture capital (1 here; 26 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); transaction costs (1 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); contracts (2 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); smart contracts (1 here; 110 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated) - Importance: core-text score 0.54 (1.00 is the top), number 64 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [153] [Financial Cryptography: Coase's Blockchain - the first... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/153.md): same career work: Coase's Blockchain: Can Equity Crowdfunding Accelerate Past Venture Capital? - [706] [Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin - with Vinay Gupta | Virtual... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/706.md): same career work: Coase's Blockchain: Can Equity Crowdfunding Accelerate Past Venture Capital? - On the same works, just before: [80] [Governing Bitcoin: what the future holds for our... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/80.md); [172] [vinay gupta | be you. (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/172.md); [112] [‘Bitcoin Is Teaching Realism To Libertarians’: An... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/112.md) - On the same works, just after: [309] [Testing "Ethereum for Web Developers" with a few friends (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/309.md); [303] [How To Sell Ideas from (from Ethereum DEVCON Berlin) (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/303.md); [113] [The Ethereum Launch Process | Ethereum Foundation Blog (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/113.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: Coase’s Blockchain: Can Equity Crowdfunding Accelerate Past Venture Capital? (slides), document, 2015, https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lE4FetnPPgN5NUnVQERzxYg8_VI4pZjlhWjNlCo_dXc/edit?usp=sharing; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [244], https://guptaoption.com/texts/244.md. ## Passages [passage 1](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lE4FetnPPgN5NUnVQERzxYg8_VI4pZjlhWjNlCo_dXc/edit?usp=sharing) Coase’s Blockchain can equity crowdfunding accelerate past Venture Capital? Vinay Gupta, Ethereum.org Coase: The Nature of the Firm Why do companies exist? Why isn’t the world a sea of individual contractors? Cost of decisions is split among all the employees: affordable correctness Y Combinator: investing is random Read “Black Swan Farming” and look between the lines... Even with an enormous sample size, they do not have any way to identify successes... and only a guess at failure.. Enter blockchains: 2nd DB revolution 1970s the SQL database expensive, one-per-firm, very fragile! 1990s computer networking databases don’t change hacked interconnects like XML-EDI N2 problem leads to hub-and-spoke Enter blockchains: 2nd DB revolution 2010s blockchains: real network databases bitcoin is an application backed by a db decentralized databases are robust no edits, no deletions, 100% history no privacy, no secrecy Smart contracts: code financial tools write a piece of code, store on a blockchain anybody can read, analyze, run the code digital signatures give us assent to the code the code can represent some contracts The prize: democratic companies Suppose Facebook or Twitter were owned by 100,000 people who originally invested $100 each? ($10m) Add “Liquid Democracy” software as pioneered by the Pirate Parties around Europe. Equity crowdfunding Like kickstarter, but if the project gets huge you make a thousand times what you put in at first Massive numbers of tiny investments make for a bureaucratic nightmare almost without equal Not hard on a blockchain... “Shares” are data in a smart contract Owners are represented by digital signatures Company performance is totally transparent Dividends / share sales are on same platform As are shareholders electing the board ... and you can go further ... Obstacles: Coase & info costs Can potential investors get enough information? For a $100 bet, you can decide on limited data Can we manage the transaction costs? That’s the whole point of blockchains in finance! Big news: this is coming everywhere This is one relatively simple example of what can be achieved using blockchain technology. Write your own financial instruments, your own corporate or governance structure. Get regulators to support this transformation! Vinay Gupta hexayurt@ ethereum.org --- End of [244] Coase’s Blockchain: Can Equity Crowdfunding Accelerate Past Venture Capital? (slides). Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [309](https://guptaoption.com/texts/309.md) Testing "Ethereum for Web Developers" with a few friends (2015); the most closely related, [153](https://guptaoption.com/texts/153.md) Financial Cryptography: Coase's Blockchain - the first... (2015); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.