# ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change (part 1 of 2) > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [251], part 1 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: video, 2020-01-24 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected - 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): Joins the shelter strand and the contracting layer in one climate-migration argument. - Career works it belongs to: - Sheet-waste question (1995): The question behind the Hexayurt: how to build a dome from 4x8 sheets without wasting 25 to 40 percent of... - Free housing and 21st Century Leadership (2010): Blog essay on the model of personal effectiveness he adopted after inventing the Hexayurt in 2002, with... - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine) - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine) - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine) - Internet of Agreements (2017): Paper at the World Government Summit in Dubai on producing legal agreements at industrial scale. (suggested by machine) - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. - 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) - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine) - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine) - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... (through a work suggested by machine) - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine) - Topics: Smart contracts, law & arbitration (17%); Burning Man shelter building (14%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: dispute resolution (7 here; 48 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); doubt discount (2 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2020); expertise (6 here; 65 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); tokenization (4 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); refugee shelter (3 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); supply chain (6 here; 92 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); refugees (5 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); Hope For The World (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); Internet of Agreements (2 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); Department of Defense (2 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated) - Importance: core-text score 0.43 (1.00 is the top), number 147 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [321] [Vinay Gupta talking at FreeAndReal / The Telaithrion... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/321.md): same career work: Sheet-waste question - [791] [COP26 Event: Green Blockchain, Green Economy (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/791.md): same career work: Sheet-waste question - On the same works, just before: [718] Conversations #5 - Vinay Gupta (2019); [191] [My Thoughtmenu on Enlightenment | The Bucky-Gandhi... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/191.md); [239] [The Future of Stuff (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/239.md) - On the same works, just after: [760] [Vinay Gupta - Across the Abyss: From Myth to Reality @... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/760.md); [771] [Vinay Gupta talks about Myths and Fears (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/771.md); [685] [Pandemics and the Coronavirus Part 2 with Vinay Gupta (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/685.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: ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change, video, 2020-01-24, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [251], https://guptaoption.com/texts/251.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages, part 1 of 2 [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=0s) welcome everybody 20 20 20 20 how nice is that it's fantastic to have you all here it's a very special event for us for several reasons firstly because climate change is one of the main focuses of what we're doing this year and Wendy who's in the audience there Wendy is running a climate change event the next one's on pebbly the fourth and we're also going to run one with with Grant Thornton and frites as well so hopefully you can make it to one of those events which is very exciting I've done it it's really invigorating it makes you think about how you balance all these things we think climate change is important issue for everybody and how do we think about it not necessarily in terms of all the the data but in terms of what are the practical things you can do about it which then let us very nicely to this to this event so just might look the second thing I want to say just before we kick in and I'm not sure I won't be long but we just had to say one thank you very much mark bishop in the audience Grant Thornton have been with us for 10 years they're moving on to other things so this is the last event they're doing with us and I just want to say huge thank you you came on board after the ultraviolet event some 10 years ago and you've been fantastic supporters and cheerleaders for us we've loved every minute and we'd just like to say huge thanks to you and all the Grant Thornton team who looked after us looking after us and being there and making life complicated and we've also had some immensely fun moments and some wonderful events in conjunction with you so just you know huge thank you from us and so finally I wanted to hand over to Alex who's going to share and give it a bit of background myself and venae this you know it's also because there's other topics that throw through this including blockchain which is very exciting for me personally and I have all for you I'm gonna let them go at it for about 45 minutes and then we'll have Q&A s but I mean if you have to interrupt please do because we're going to get some good questions I'm looking forward to it but looking forward a fascinating and thank you both be known Alex coming all the way down from London to come and speak with us it's very exciting to have you here thank you thank you thank you Tony can [2:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=142s) you can everyone hear me all right fantastic yeah well thank you first see to Tony and thank you to all of the organizers here for inviting me along from RIT bene I know I'm having a conversation with Vinay last week and and talking to him earlier today what kind of kind of Polly Matthews I think is a reasonable description and so I think tonight will be a really stimulating and interesting discussion and I hate everything Suzy to just kind of explain Who I am other than being some of the occasionally plays cricket with Tony I'm a former political adviser to the Shadow Cabinet actually on education issues I was a counselor in London for for eight years for my sins and I'm now of course a consultant working partly in Deloitte's and their reputation resilience team with some interesting kind of corporate clients there but actually particularly the reason I'm here is I do some work advising clients in the clean air space if there is a climate emergency I think the urgency with which ah air needs to be cleaned up the crisis that we have in terms of our the air and the health impacts of our transport system is something that it's very much the forefront of my mind and I'm sure is one of the things we'll be discussing tonight and I think we've got it until about sort of 8:00 8:15 and the title for tonight's event is hope for the world the climate engineer and then I can introduce himself but I'll just I'll give you the kind of a brief biography of him as his experience he's responsible as one of the founders of material for their corporate strategy vision external communications and reputation a leading figure in the blockchain space and I'm sure one of the first things he'll be doing too is explaining to all of us what blockchain is those of you are experts in this he coordinated the release of the blockchain platform Ethereum in July 2015 and has claimed that block can save society so we'll be I'm sure grilling him on on that claim he was the architect to the National bought change has to be for Dubai and was a partner at hexayurt Capital a technology focus VC firm behind the internet agreements he's the winner of the 2003 economist book of the year and has contributed to the US [4:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=292s) Department of Defense research and actually has a very long and very interesting background in humanitarian work particularly in developing an open-source refugee shelter which has gone on to become iconic at the Burning Man festival so Vinay I wanted to start [5:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=310s) if you like go back into the 1990s if we can all remember that far back you're actually involved in an early digital currency I think in an era where it's fair to say very few people probably had access to the Internet let alone we're interested in cryptocurrencies as they were then sure so in the mid 1990s the whole digital currency game or was really kicked off by set very early actors David Shaw my think was probably the first um the system that I was involved with was a gold box digital currency so they had about a million reserves I was in Canada um and your account balance was denominated to grams of gold and in the early days you could physically mail from gold and they were to say it and then they'd credit your account that many grams - a fee and then later on and they would only work with cash in and cash out but those models of kind of asset backed digital currencies were very successful because you had minimal volatility it was a very clean very elegant system and a few years later on from that you got involved in something quite different which was which was called hexayurts which essentially sure explained it better than me but a form of temporary housing yeah 10 for Refugees and disaster victims what kind of drove you to go from being this kind of gold crypto prospector if you'd like to get involved in it not very well so that story goes back a little further to the well in if you want to thinking from one angle to the 1960s so there was a spiritual teacher in America called Stephen Gaskin who was I want to see a Korean War veteran he was a little older than the hippies probably in his mid 40s and he taught thing called the Monday night class which was a sort of perennial wisdom class for hippie mystics and he told us in the Haight Ashbury the peak in the 60s and about 71 and they loaded up a couple hundred people in two school buses and drove across America looking for land to buy because they were convinced that the boil had come off the 60s and the whole scene was going down and they were right and they sat for the police called Tennessee police called the farm in Tennessee summertime and farm was like a testbed for appropriate technology [7:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=460s) because they were very poor and they were very interested in global issues and they were very interested in disaster relief in humanitarian and doing something about world poverty so they tried to build the farm homes like as a testbed for those technologies they were very early on in agriculture for soy in America they figured out tofu and how to do it in the States and he capitalized the American midwifery tradition at the built on what of Jews ik domes and a lot of their personnel left for San Francisco and the tech boom started in the mid 80s I've worked at a place called the whole earth electronic linked place called the well you said top quite regularly called cliff Figueroa who was part of that um and the farm really looms quite large like most threads of the kind of American green progressive counterculture if you'll fold the thread back far enough it's usually somebody from the farm that kicked it off so I went down there in 95 just from look around like this place was famous and they totally reoriented my perspective on life for the weekend it was astonishing because I went down there and I met guy Carl Albert Bates who runs a thing called world watch an Albert was just like so there's this thing called the environmental crisis and it just turns out that we're running out of environment and this is like 95 and I'm like you walk and he sits down and it's like well you don't hear the numbers here's topsoil and here's deforestation and here's a couple other things and here's this global warming thing and you know we're gonna run off the rails it's pretty much inevitable at current rates that we're gonna have a real crisis in the future and just thought you'd like to know you see the young and smart you should do something about this thanks man and then even worse because you know really I guess it just digitally had an eye for talent like you okay you're lying around you don't have a pond let's give you something to do kid um so then they took me to see a bunch of there to kind of GDC dome stuff I said Vinay can you figure out how to make at GDC dome with no waste because we keep cutting these judie tzuke dorms out of four by eight sheets and for my sheets are nice clean rectangular you know four feet by eight feet one by two rectangle and if you think about GD Zig domes you've seen them in pictures the surface is made of lots and lots and lots of funny little triangles well it turns out the funny little triangles don't fit on four by eight sheet very well and it was producing unacceptable wealth as a waste so they can you do something about this so I put six months into it and got precisely nowhere I got like a six or [10:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=610s) seven percent improvement but it was it was in no way shape or form what we needed um so then I went back to worked for you know the fight Semmy or work I was doing in the Air Force at the time and can build around in technology and you know with successes and failures around the next five years and then I didn't pick the whole thing back up again until after 9/11 so after 9/11 I washed out the technology and went to energy policy because I wanted to try and do something about this whole like 20 years war for oil thing this is this is not acceptable we're not doing that so when often joined an energy policy think-tank and when I was there somebody there should Haven a you know we just did this refugee workshop could you figure out how to make a refugee shelter the flat parks onto the back of a truck right so the idea is that you have a refugee population you bring the truck you brew up the buildings they live in the buildings but it's same to resettle them back where they came right fighting has stopped through villages see if you could go back their possessions back onto the truck all the houses are folded up and put on the truck as well and you drive the flatbed back wherever they came from improvement buildings back up again if their houses have been burned down or flooded out or over it and it was kind of like um well I am a software engineer not the other kind of a drupe and then I thought like I did do a bunch of work on this back in five six seven years ago I mean take a shot at this so I got a piece of paper and I asked this absolutely archetypical software engineering question which is what is the simplest thing that could possibly work draw a four by eight sheet divide it up into some triangles kind of a V a kind of one up on them huh and I then I kind of cut the triangles out and I'm putting it together and sure enough you could make a little roof over those pieces and I'm like huh okay and then it becomes very clear that you could just put a warm under the roof pieces because they're all the same size because they're all cry out for my eight and we're done there's our shelter um and I'm so looking at this like it can't be that easy it was literally 15 minutes I'm like I think we're done so the next year I take a prototype to the Burning Man festival with some materials that were donated from 3m and an American industrial Carver company called pocketed and an insulation manufacturer called reflect axe something that kind of rubs off your name um and they just send me a bunch of materials so I thousand bucks worth of bits because it's old weird esoteric building stuff and we take this thing out to Burning Man and I distinctly [12:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=760s) remember the moment when I realized that it worked so we're inside this whole pod and the thing is you know eight feet wide by 7 feet long by six feet high it's quite big 4/10 but quite small for a house and opened the door one morning and there's a one yard visibility dust storm it's just whipping past that the shelter you know you can see everything is flapping around outside and people running around yelling and it's just total chaos I never sang to that I closed the door and it immediately stops and then I have this realization of like okay so this is a bunch of cardboard and some esoteric tape from 3m and some kind of plastic foil sheet stuff that we've taped around there and I didn't know that dust storm was happening a toy I opened the door like this is the tent this is a building it has an inside and outside and you know there's real separation it's cool in the daytime it's warm at night it's largely soundproof Wow okay I guess we're doing this and that sort of set the trajectory for my life because I knew that going from a single shelter festival to providing cover for hundreds of millions of people which is what we're gonna need we're going to hundreds of millions of people's worth of shelter was gonna take decades right and I knew that for large parts of that I was going to be working so far in advance of anybody else's understanding of the problem that it was going to be unfunded and that turned out to be true because every time I would sit down with people and explain that we're expecting a hundred million climate refugees in ten years 20 years 30 years in the future we need to do funding on technology research now so we can meet the capacity then people's eyes would roll back in the back of their heads like you know they've just done an enormous bomb hit the resist this kind of like they're just kind of stare into space like that can't possibly be happening and even if it is happening that's not how our budgeting cycle work if you're doing four year budgets when somebody comes in and says thirty years in the future we need to rehouse 300 million people and it takes a long time to get good of things we have to start now people think you're insane and so I went through really 15 years of people not getting why this was needed while the carbon continued to climb and while the humanitarian noise continued to increase and everybody just pretended that none of this stuff was going to turn into an actual humanitarian crisis and then about five years ago we started to see the boat people across from Africa and it was like okay this is starting to kick off and Egypt [15:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=910s) becomes destabilize by food price spikes which were produced by drought same things in Syria drought war and I'm just gonna wash in this like they're on the way they're on the way they're on the way and it's not really until the Australian wildfires that we've gone through this sudden transition point where that work has become visible to people people are just like oh oh so if something like Australia happens at a country like Africa I country like India or one of the African countries we're gonna see enormous displacement yes and all the villages will be gone yes but the people will walk away okay where do we put them and so we're just getting to that horizon and that's 18 years it was the temptation at that point when you had that Eureka moment about to kind of become I don't know the sort of the I care of the disaster shelter world rather than I understand you went down a kind of a different route which was to provide this and a resource basis to say anyone can have it feel free to build it yes I mean we [16:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=973s) tried the IKEA thing good and hard I had a I had a whole bunch of conversations with people that were very tightly associated with a Kia over the years about IKEA doing the shelters and I think it's inevitable that IKEA eventually will do them because we have manufactured hexayurts on production lines also do tabletop for IKEA same factories same equipment and but IKEA backed a different shelter design called better shelter which is actually worse shelter oh it's just it's very expensive it's hard to put up it doesn't last very well and it catches fire um so they backed it because a Swedish guy convinced them that he was a professional designer and he was good design assailed her and it was gonna be really amazing and I had trained Johan over several years we'd built many shelters together we done a whole bunch of workshops they told classes with him and so he'd absorbed a lot on the mindset of the heck's here but the problem with designers is that they have to design right and the hexayurt for all that it is a structure in its way and I really do mean perfect it's impossible to improve on if you start from the assumption you're working with four by eight sheet there is no better way of using four by eight sheet to make a shelter and that's literally something that you could prove right a mathematician a saint could look at it it's as good as it's gonna get so the problem is essentially vanity right he wanted to produce something that was built from scratch shelter center in Geneva which was the UN's shelter Research Center had a terrible design called the shelter module which he'd been chipping away at for years and there was a bunch of not invented here and there was a bunch of you're not a designer how could you possibly know about this uh one of the major tragedies of that period of history is that there was just no way of getting the thing through those cultural barriers and the other factor was that the US Department of Defense were big fans of hexayurt so they've bill hexayurts in the garden in the middle of the Pentagon many times they're an integral part of a disaster relief project they do called star tides and they came very close to deploying them on a gigantic scale off the Haitian earthquake you're serious conversations had so there was a bit of this kind of humanitarian horror about you know you're not from the NGO world the thing is no it's engineer style rather than designer style it's got all of these ties to the US military establishment [18:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=1123s) where IKEA we're not touching and that was a disaster it's wrong turn because the better shelter cannot be produced in vast quantities right it uses a whole bunch of weird custom connectors it's extremely expensive to produce it requires a special factory and when you run out of capacity in the factory there are no more shelters available just can't do it the hexayurt approach you know we could literally take a truck down to Home Depot and walk out with enough stuff to put up half of Oxford in shelters I think we take us about a fortnight to build them and any single one of you could help with that process right if you can work a power drill or a manual saw if you can you know hold boards and help lift a roof you know you can build these things it's designed such that the refugees themselves could do the vast majority of the labor involved and all the materials are in the standard industrial supply chain so you just take very common things and put them on trucks and then you build the shelters use a combination of skilled teachers initial labor to help get started and then trained refugees um and it's just a very different paradigm because you know I think we could all see at this point that hundreds of millions displaced is a very likely outcome right the warming is happening very quickly we've seen huge areas destroyed in Australia droughts in poor countries typically result in an enormous amount of displacement um and you know feeling people is relatively easy right you put the food on a truck or a boat and you take it to them housing them is a lot harder because tents decay in the heat at an average tent will get about six months and the outdoors before it'll rot away and just through the ultraviolet light and moisture and all of that and so it's quite it's quite difficult to see how you manage you know five percent of the human race on the March without thinking in terms of temporary cities rather than refugee camps and by temporary I mean fifty years not five years you know we're really talking about very large-scale movements and for that you need to start thinking in terms of like almost like improvised urbanism rather than refugee shelters and it's not one of the sort of ironic flaws of the hexayurt that it's too permanent the humanitarian industry didn't want to have a responsibility for these kind of temporary cities last 50 years rather than a refugee shelter fair yeah this is a this is a perennial problem so it's such a mess so everything in the world [21:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=1273s) is you'll know is defined by budget right so there is one pool of money for disaster relief and there's another pool of money for sustainable development and what constitutes disaster relief is that disasters are short after the disaster everybody goes home so when you're thinking in terms of these people have no place to go now what would be ideal is if you could take the disaster relief money and then invest the endurable certain AG goods and systems that would lost them for decades well into the sustainable development part of their life right you know there really shouldn't be a divide there because if you're a villager and your village is now gone because of drought or flooding and you're never gonna go home again about when you're starting a new life with nothing and your all of your needs are sustainable development you are in crisis but your actual problem is a development problem not a disaster problem because it's not like we apply the band-aid and we stabilize you and you go back home again you're not going home and that position where people have nowhere to go back to really doesn't fit inside of any of our existing categories it doesn't quite fit the refugee model because in many cases these people have no they're not being chased by anybody they're just have nowhere to go right there they're not seeking refuge from an aggressor there's just no option for them and they might be internally displaced people which is a very squishy category it's quite difficult to deal with and but they're not they're also economic migrants in they need to return to normal life which means finding work so they need a job they need a place to live they've come from a place where their holders have gone or their agriculture has become impossible but they don't really fit this kind of model with like you had a flood you walked across the border and the flood went away you went home again so there are that a poor fit for the existing bureaucratic structures and if you're perfect for the existing bureaucracy you're really in trouble because if you don't fit into any of the bureaucratic boxes turns out nobody is budget to help and the hexayurt fell between those stools because it was a disaster relief project that was intended to last for decades to immediately switch into sustainable development mode thinking so maybe it's time will come again in a sense with the coming potential disaster around climate migration well I mean I expected it to take 30 years to go from one prototype of Burning Man in 2003 to deployable mobile capacity like everything I had seen said that anything worth doing takes 15 to 20 years disorganized so the [23:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=1423s) reason that I didn't start a company is if you start a company to produce a shelter what are the odds of that company will still be around in 30 years one in a hundred be similar effect an NGO funding all right start an NGO how many charities that you start today will still be around with three decades so I decided I was gonna run it as a hobby right because you could carry a hobby for decades you could continue to work on something for decades nothing will stop you sorry as well as its broadly within the parameters of the level of effort that hobby requires you know I've kind of been an obsessive hobbyist you know there are times when I would spend half a year working on this stuff but as long as you're making good money the other half of the year you could continue to push forward and I got lots of people to help me along the way so now every year a burning line they build something like 5,000 units and there are about five or six different companies doing commercial manufacturing and there's a hexayurt cut a second-generation project called ShiftPod which is like a hex Europe you could fold it up in the back of the card it's about half of gin a hexayurt in a tent and they're selling into places where refugee comes to the actual refugees living in these things quite happily there's a large-scale commercial production so it's come to one point nicely I mean every year that are more shelters available and if we continue at the carbon rate of growth I think by the time we hit the third year marker in 2033 13 years from oh I think it's very plausible that we will be sheltering tens to hundreds of millions of people because it's really cheap and it works great and you know as long as the idea you know if you don't die and you continue to grow over 30 years you really can't go from you know a single seed to an enormous forest - you've got [25:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=1532s) involved in Ethereum in 2000 we've the launch was in 2050 what was it that attracted you to I guess the first of all the concept of the blockchain and what Ethereum we're doing and what what kind of drove your hypothesis that blockchain could be somehow a panacea for many of these challenges we're facing in the world so my interest in the books was really based on my tech experience in the late 1990s working on a technology platform called XML EDI so XML EDI was an attempt to get the world's computers King together in a kind of tightly integrated sort of systemic synthetic way and it more or less amounted to specially formatting data and then sending it to another computer having that computer decode what you'd sent it and then update its internal registers to match what you'd sent so it's kind of a synchronization approach you'd kind of send a synchronization packet and something would catch this organization pocket and then doodlee synchronize everything but it was very kind of message oriented and it really didn't work all that well I mean it was it was kind of rickety and it was expensive to implement so there was this huge vision of turned around there was an HP Labs project called espeak which are you know 2003-2004 an enormous vision of how the world changes if you could get the computers talking to each other properly because it allows for all the companies to interconnect all their vendors and all their customers is such that when something happens when a customer say doubles an order that ripples through the entire network as if by magic so you never get supply chain stores at all this kind of stuff so the vision was correct but accidentally the oils in the technology and then about five or six years after XML the yeah I can't wait and wait there's not a crack called WSGI soap web services initiative all that stuff and that made a little more progress but it never really caught fire partly bad market timing um but it was left with a very strong impression that there was an enormous thing waiting to be done in building a sort of business business internet using some unspecified technology so what I saw Bitcoin could we come over the horizon I was aware that it was a big deal I spoke a bunch of Bitcoin conferences but it was still doing a bunch of Defense really it work and I didn't want a bunch of you know like hacker cryptography anonymous kasha [28:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=1682s) written by unknown individuals sitting on the same machine that I was emailing like departments from like I just wasn't comfortable with that side to say there was not gonna buy this stuff and I was gonna keep my hands clean but I was still very interested in and I went to conferences and I talked to conferences and it can I try to lay out some technology strategy for the people in the field that were very young and overall and ambitious um and then Ethereum came along and the Ethereum guys are talking about smart contracts and this is to my ears prick up because that was the high-water mark of nineties for Prague Rafi maybe 90s early 2000s the hot the smart contract was kind of the one great day in the future we will have the smart contract and when I saw a team beginning to talk about that I'm like okay I'm gonna quit my defense job and I'm gonna go do that instead right it's time to walk across the aisle because they're finally back at the point where they're going into the future like Bitcoin was kind of a cop chapter where we'd be in the 90s the Ethereum was the point where we began to move forward in time again what is the smart contract this is something that can something that put the lawyers out business yeah you wish no as I say to people you know the the last cockroach the last rat and the loss of lawyer we'll all be competing for the last scrap of food right I mean the lawyer is not the lawyers are durable sturdy thread checks we must think about what kind of world we're weaving Keith Richards I'm sure Hans if anybody understands what a smart contract is okay all right we got a few so I apologize if this bores you um so there are two ways to thinking about the smart contract there's what we've got today and there's hope we'll have in ten years so what we've got today is basically um the the formulas that you type into Excel spreadsheets but in this sort of blockchain world rather than the cell world those formulas can actually move money around themselves without any support so that about is complicated you've all used Excel at one time or another you know and take you know b1 multiply it by B 3 add it to be 16 and then multiplied by d 4 and then prove that amount of money into cells you know C 5 that kind of Excel stuff so imagine [30:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=1832s) that but when the formula runs it takes money out of your bank account gives it to somebody and you can never get the money back again and that's smart contracts as they currently stand now that does sound a little rickety and a little scary and there is a little rickety and a little scary and a bunch of lunatics used that technology to build what amounted to Excel spreadsheets for doing initial public offerings of what was legally roughly equivalent to equity and then basically did bootstrap bootleg initial public offerings of weird law tech companies to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in a thing that was known as the ICO craze and the SEC has a pile of about 1,200 litigations that they're going to work through one at a time over the next few years going to resolve that mess and so it turns out that this market contract is an astonishingly powerful contract I mean you know tens of billions of dollars have gone over these things but it turns out that if you don't get the legal side with a sporran contract correct you've got software which will move money around and you can create financial instruments using these systems but it all turns out to be illegal which is kind of unfortunate so that's kind of where the ecosystem is now 10 years from now and the assumption is that what we're going to wind up with is a system where we have large competent comprehensive technology platforms which have coold legal analysis contract law dispute resolution and a couple of other services all kind of combined in with allows you to do things like buy and sell equity and houses all around the world in a way which will actually deliver ibly legally bind to the value embedded in those houses and the reason that you would want to do that is basically this right now there are kind of two gigantic systems in the world both which are very rickety and very underperforming one of them is the global treated logistics system and it says if you ever buy anything from a site called Aliexpress it's kind of like a Chinese Amazon and it lets you buy things directly from China and then they'll we just drop them and hit an envelope and mail them to you and they take maybe three weeks to come across because they come by boat so they're like free shipping from China for things that cost a fiver and you can see the same things on Amazon for 1695 and all that's [33:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=1982s) happening is the guys on Amazon are ordering this stuff in huge crates they're shipping it across there and they're sitting there warehousing and charging you through the nose they're tripling the price of things on the way through that journey because they're warehousing them and then they're shipping them to you armas on next day so you bought from Amazon sixty ninety five arrives tomorrow morning you buy from Aliexpress takes three weeks that enormous ratchet is not an efficient market at work right that's a whole bunch of middlemen jacking up the prices in which benefits them but not you or the people manufacturing in China and all of that exists because international customs are incredibly inefficient and because warehousing is expensive and because we don't really have a fluid responsive international trade architecture if we did there would be a small difference in price from next day delivery versus three day delivery but that versus you know three weeks delivery but the whole thing would be kind of smooth now and what's happening is that we've got these big lumps in the international trade system which people are arbitrage and like no tomorrow making a bunch of money doing but it's not benefiting either consumer or producer so problem one and the second system has enormous problems is the financial system so if I want to buy go what's it let's say that I own a house notionally I have a house own 100% of there it's in zone three and wonderful I just say that I want to hedge my risk so that my assets are protected from London price spikes so I want to do is I want to stay living in my house but I want to swap equity in my house with a hundred other people in hundreds of more houses around the world so you own one percent of a hundred houses they all would one percent one hundred houses and we all still live in our houses and we're own know will risk compensated from volatility in the markets that we happen to be in very reasonable the administrative overhead of doing some like that is a hundred sets of paperwork across a whole bunch of different legal jurisdictions because the same thing that gives you insulation from risk is that you're operating in different legal jurisdictions and the friction becomes so enormous that you can't risk compensate in this way unless you're an enormous hedge fund so part of the reason the hedge funds rule the world particularly qualm funds is because they're so big they can afford to do the paperwork involved in doing international asset transfers which is [35:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=2132s) what you require if you're going to get portfolio stability in a rapidly changing globalized world and what that creates is an enormous benefit for large entities at the cost of small players like us all being very fragile to variations and fluctuations in the local economy so we're all being systemic lis disadvantage because unless you give your assets to a hedge fund if they manage the money for you you can't overcome the transactional costs of doing the necessary transactions to risk stabilize your asset pools and and those problems are creating kind of systemic injustice in the financial system which is making it very hard for ordinary people to feel like they're getting any kind of fair deal from the financial system I'm not see that's even first worlders are having those problems imagine how bad it would see if you're trying to raise capital for a small business in India or China you just can't get access to the financial markets even if you're in a country that has a 20% a rate of growth in some regions you know some of these places is seeing 20% per annum GDP growth in small areas and it's impossible to get capital into those places so all of those problems are caused by the inability to get paperwork done to get everybody on the same page internationally to have machines handle the paperwork in the bureaucracy rather than people to get efficient translations of contract so you know that if one side saying that mantra and the other side signed it in English it says the same thing there are just layers of complexity and bureaucracy and problems in doing logistics and Finance internationally and all of that is going to get solved in the next 20 to 30 years by technologies like the blockchain and the things that inevitably follow it so that it should become as easy to do true business with somebody in China or India or Africa as it is to send them an email and this is kind of software eats the world the software systems will become powerful enough that they smooth out all the international barriers in the same way that we had to smooth out the international barriers to get the web to work it's it's the same process but it's the internet takes the next step into the real world and this was known as the Internet of agreements this is the internet of agreements I mean is there a --- Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/251-2.md (part 2 of 2). End of [251] ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.