# European Parliament blockchain presentation May 2017 > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [265]. 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, 2017-05-11 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFVuccuHI8. 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): Explains ledgers to lawmakers as automated governance. - Career works it belongs to: - Dubai Blockchain Strategy (2016): Helped create Dubai's government blockchain strategy, which aimed to run all applicable government... - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (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) - Half a Trillion Dollars a Year of Magic: Blockchain, AI, and the Future of the Built Environment (2026): Mattereum essay: combine AI with the blockchain into self-enforcing smart contracts and move real estate... (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) - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. (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) - Topics: Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (20%); blockchain / speed / light (20%); blockchain / global / internet (13%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: internet money (3 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); peer-to-peer (5 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); internet globalism (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); Silicon Valley (4 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); Dubai (4 here; 41 sources in all, earliest dated 2011, 1 undated); local control (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); global trade (3 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); platforms (6 here; 76 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); Globalization 2.0 (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); oracles (1 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2016) - The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): internet globalism - Importance: core-text score 0.45 (1.00 is the top), number 130 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [706] [Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin - with Vinay Gupta | Virtual... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/706.md): same career work: Dubai Blockchain Strategy - [227] [Dubai Mandates Blockchain-Only Government Documents By... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/227.md): same career work: Dubai Blockchain Strategy - On the same works, just before: [709] [Can blockchain solve the accountability gap? | Vinay Gupta (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/709.md); [268] [Thomas Bjelkeman of Akvo.org and Vinay Gupta of... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/268.md); [266] ["Blockchain: IoT's trust broker?" talk on the fly by... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/266.md) - On the same works, just after: [263] [Ethereal Summit (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/263.md); [211] [Digital Catapult welcomes Vinay Gupta as Blockchain... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/211.md); [836] [13 Oct 17 Law – Internet of Agreements (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/836.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: European Parliament blockchain presentation May 2017, video, 2017-05-11, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFVuccuHI8; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [265], https://guptaoption.com/texts/265.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFVuccuHI8&t=0s) view on this technology so the floor is yours thank you so much for coming with us [Applause] okay so you have to excuse me a little horse this morning uh so I made a stop and pause occasionally um let's start at the beginning I could ask to explain what a blockchain is hmm okay yeah I can ask to explain what a blockchain is and we'll go over that material in a little more detail than usual so that we have a firm platform for understanding for the rest of the day and to catch anybody up who's kind of merely interested in this field and then we'll talk a little bit about uh what the implications are for large-scale systems on the blockchain particularly affect the universe the government are interested in um so with that let's get moving so the first thing is that not all software is regulated or needs to be regulated we regulate software based on its impacts based on what it achieves what it does in the real world and not everything that is equally in need of Regulation an application which runs on a single device which doesn't communicate with any other person which doesn't interact with sense and personal information essentially doesn't lead to regulation any more than notebook reads regulation there's very similar properties on the other hand something like medical records management where you've got security issues and personal data all over the place where it's networked the information may be transferred internationally something along these kind of lines is extremely in need of Regulation so there's a range of degrees of requirement for regulation um Bitcoin is of course the blockchain that everybody's heard of and Bitcoin is frankly insane it's one of the most mad things to ever happen and I mean this in a very literal sense right the other piece of software that issues currencies makes payments already this is strange the currency is a currency that is contained inside of the Software System occasionally we refer to colloquially as magic internet money strange again 25 billion euros has emerged from this magic internet money that's a lot of magic internet money and nobody knows the original authors of the software so you you know this is really right something out of Science Fiction that's bizarre there's there's no this is completely unreasonable but it's the world that we live in and we should get [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFVuccuHI8&t=150s) used to seeing unreasonable things our model of how the world works is based on our own past it's based on previous rates of change as the rate of technological change accelerates we will see more and more and more things which are unprecedented and have this quality of like I don't even have words for that I can't even actually name what that is I'm faced with this kind of rate of change We have basically three strategies right we can figure out some way of pulling the utopian potential out of these Technologies uh we can fail to pull the utopian technology out of these Technologies and get a mixed bag which will turn towards dystopia or we can basically knock the Technologies back as far as we can and hope that we will get you know some kind of stability and stasis in the face of this rate of change obviously I prefer the utopian potential but if it's a choice between Utopia or dystopia maybe we prefer stagnation and that choice is really at the heart of regulation of these kind of Technologies can we avoid the dystopian future by anything other than stagnation this is a heavy question this doesn't just affect um blockchain this is all of the new technologies vrar self-driving cars drones AI that entire family of Technologies are all going to push these kind of questions to the Forefront over the next maybe five years um if there's one thing that I want people to remember today it's this right the future is a foreign country and it's our largest trading partner normally when we think about comparative advantage for trade comparative advantages between two countries that have different properties right one country is good at making wine one country is good at making I don't know that pork you have an exchange everything is fine what we have now is comparative advantage between the present and the future the present has an awful of real estate the future has an awful lot of technology and we're continually having this trade between the present and the future as William Gibson the science fiction author says the future is already present it's just not evenly distributed and we've trade between the future forward and the Future Past parts of the world right some places like London trade on their history some places like California trade on their Futurity um the trade between the past the present and the future is the majority of the actual trade right and if you think about this in your own life the building is 150 200 years old the cell [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFVuccuHI8&t=300s) phone is six months old and the day job is the thing that connects the two together person pass the future in a trading equilibrium and understanding that is a very important part of thinking about how we approach new technology if you think of the future as being a cooker and trading partner when you see a new technology the question is well if this is being exported by another country would we want it how would we approach it the other thing is that future has no coherent Representatives there is no government of the future there is no Embassy for the future so we have trade with this thing that breaks out right left and Center that brings completely new goods and services to the table but has no political representation and in a sense we ourselves have to be the political representation of the future we have to decide how the future will be perceived how it will be represented and who it is that speaks for the future and indeed who speaks for the president in the past but I think we can all agree that the representation of the present and the task is generally much stronger than the representation for the future but I think that's changing as time passes right on to the Core Business [6:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFVuccuHI8&t=372s) um the first thing that comprises blockchain is it's a peer-to-peer network of computers and we've seen peer-to-peer networks before there is nothing dramatic about peer-to-peer Network we'll discuss a more in a moment second thing is the peer-to-peer networks securely share synchronized State you've seen this before this is Dropbox this is Google Documents any number of other systems some proprietary some open source a set of rules for update in the shared state from a given moment in time how do we know what a valid future condition is again no magic finally the whole system is a software platform that's fine we have lots of software platforms so in theory there is no fundamental magic to the blockchain the set of components that we've seen before arrange a novel configuration um Skype Bittorrent because our line wired we've all seen peer-to-peer Society did not break down Google Docs Dropbox again we know these Technologies we use them no drama surf rules for updating shared state is interesting if there's any magic in the system this is where it is because what we have is um a much more sophisticated set rules for maintaining the shared State the rules for modifying the shared model of the world inside of this Bitcoin Ledger system are much more sophisticated than are typical inside of these systems again will come back to us finally Regulators are already used to managing software platforms there's nothing fundamentally new about managing software platforms so if all this stuff is relatively familiar to us if all the components are familiar what is it about this particular arrangement of components that causes the drama and the answer is 25 billion appeared from nowhere the only reason anybody's interested in this stuff is because it appears to be a machine that prints money and if the total market cap of all the blockchain Technologies together was about say 100 million dollars I don't think we'd be here talking about it at the end of the day matches we all like to say it's not about Bitcoin if Bitcoin wasn't going anywhere financially it would not be about blockchain either so where is the money coming from um the answer is pretty simple Bitcoin takes all this technology platform we [8:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFVuccuHI8&t=522s) call blockchain and it uses that technology platform to implement what amounts to a Central Bank of the internet and the Central Bank of the internet is a bit Rough and Ready it doesn't do all the things you'd expect a central bank to do but it does kind of sort of work and it works because the shared State represented by the Bitcoin ecosystem has a set of rules for updating the shared state that correspond to what a central bank would do so we start at the beginning of time with zero Bitcoins we have a monetary policy which issues Bitcoins at rate of roughly 10 coins every 10 minutes we have a set of rules for how those coins were distributed and we have set rules for transfer of the assets from one person to another person and that very simple rule set gives you monetary policy and a very crude very simple banking system and that system prints coins the coins float in a free market against other currencies and currently it's issuing about three million dollars a day that's where the money is coming from it's coming from exactly the same place that money comes from with a central bank prints money nowhere it appears for me and this is an extremely dramatic and peculiar development you shouldn't really have a Central Bank of the internet now you have one it's pretty obviously a discontinuous change technologically now we have to decide exactly what's going to happen to the Central Bank of the internet maybe you just legitimize it maybe you decide this stuff is not okay but it has to be understood that this is the Central Bank of the future The Future Has Come calling what are the things it sent us is a currency and now we have to decide how we're going to approach that almost as if it was being issued by a sovereign entity called the future and this shift in perspective to understanding that the future is a coherent other place for which new things emerge is the core takeaway today learn to think about the futurism place which sends us goods and we can begin to understand the gravity with which we have to regard our relationships with the future so it's not inherently surprising you should be able to make software represent a central bank because all of existing central banks are made of software this is not fundamentally dramatic it's a little strange in the way that it actually works right but the fact that it works in this way is just emblematic of the further Direction change the evolution will tend to be in the direction of this extremely surprising discontinuous structure [11:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFVuccuHI8&t=672s) things will come from nowhere so the final closing of the loop is that Bitcoin uses the money that it's issuing to pay for the services that are required to maintain the Bitcoin software platform essentially it pays its workers in the cash for the issues and in this way it's also somewhat Sovereign state-like it has a certain strangeness at the center where you issue the currency that you use to pay the people who do the work of issuing the currency right and some very clever people did this but right although this is a completely new thing we shouldn't mistake the rule set that Bitcoin instantiates the Central Bank of the internet with the underlying blockchain technology the blockchain could support a wide variety of rule sets this just happens to be the one that they picked this is a set of rules as a group of people chose to implement right we don't know who those people are we don't fully understand why they chose they should not set rules but it's an application that runs on the blockchain the blockchain is the underlying software platform Bitcoin is an application that runs on that underlying software platform it happens to be a Central Bank of the internet this is not the only thing you can do with the underlying platform if the platform is powerful that's what you can run a central bank on the internet on it you want to be able to run large chunks of global trade you ought to be able to manage the supply chain you ought to be able to trade electricity you could do just about anything with that platform and the confusion between the platform technology which we now call blockchain and the application which happened to be called Bitcoin untangling that confusion has taken us about five years in the media and even now there's still a lot of misunderstanding of what's connected so the thing I want you to understand here is that we can make the rules that run on the blockchains that we control we can set up a set of rules we can implement the set of rules and it will run as Faithfully as Bitcoin does more or less um without us having to buy into the Bitcoin political Vision which is a very peculiar one now this ability to implement your own sets of rules can be done in two basic ways the first is one set of rules per blockchain and this is expansive and inefficient because you're replicating the platform infrastructure every time you want to set up a set of rules it'd be like writing your own operating system every time you wanted to write a new application doesn't make any sense so project that I was involved with in [13:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFVuccuHI8&t=822s) the blockchain space is called ethereum and uh I have launch ethereum I was one of the individual communicators on the project it's on the project management um so you know be aware that I have some skin in the game here the the critical thing about the ethereum model is that the smart contract allows you to build new applications that share the same underlying blockchain and this is two advantages the cost of rolling out the application is much lower and secondly the applications can communicate with each other to form systems and those systems can be multi-jurisdictional one team creates contract one one team creates contract two one team creates contract three and those systems interact while they each have a autonomous governance and this is quite useful this is an interesting thing ethereum also has a central bank function much like Bitcoins but whether or not that will turn out to be core to their technology when we look back in five or ten years it's hard to know uh I generally am of the opinion that the coin systems are a temporary anomaly I'm not sure that we're going to be mining these things in the future so Enterprise Ethereum Alliance is building versions of ethereum which are not dependent on the coin systems that do not require a central bank to function they've run much more like standard application platforms that are essentially Cloud infrastructure and blockchain on a cloud-like underwriting system is a very reasonable way of proceeding right there's no reason not to do that for the vast majority of the applications that people want to write you do not need to blockchain that pays for itself using a central bank maybe you do for some instances but for the vast majority of things this is not necessary so let's talk about the future [15:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFVuccuHI8&t=920s) directions the first thing is that current blockchains which use this kind of mining model are slow 30 transactions a second for ethereum this is too slow to run the world it's barely fast enough to run a video game um obviously this has to change over time there's an enormous amount of work being put into making these things fast it's not here yet second thing is uh entropy baths last so errors in code are Universal if there are human beings involved you'll have mistakes in blockchains these mistakes tend to be irrevocable so there's a lot of work on using formal methods to mathematically verify the contracts is what you think that work is a relatively early stage but there are a number of startups working in the area and some of them are making real progress um scaled blockchain merged into the cloud so one possibility is that in a few years cloud and blockchain will become more or less synonymous cloud services we've picked up all kinds of cryptographic techniques from blockchain blockchain we've picked up scaling techniques from cloud through Technologies like lightning networks and it would just become a general computing surface uh similarly computer security on blockchains makes an awful lot of sense you could easily imagine software update mechanisms merging into blockchain so you simply have a blockchain based mechanism for deploying for example antivirus software so all of these kind of diffusions of these Technologies into each other point to a future where you have a single well-defended heterogeneous parallel Computing surface a kind of distributed Global supercomputer that manages a lot of the security processes and the potential managers a lot of the things we do in Supply chains personal identification and similar but exactly the shape of that platform and how long it will take to create nobody really knows but this is the general direction travel uh now the blockchain hype cycle right um the blockchain is essentially as to Silicon Valley as Silicon Valley is to the rest of the world right even people in Silicon Valley we look at this and are just like what are these people doing this is crazy um and it's kind of nice to see Silicon Valley looking at some piece of new technology in total fear uh it's quite reassuring that they can still be surprised um right now we have a full-scale hype cycle circus around blockchain right there's no denying that large companies are trying to cash in there are any number of scammy weird little entrepreneurial shops running uh something very large is happening but there are also all kinds of weird institutions attempting to grift on the [17:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFVuccuHI8&t=1070s) energy of the blockchain and differentiating what is good practice for bad practice is very difficult right find deeply technical people that you trust have them guide you in this because judging whether something is legitimate or nonsense based on its PR is basically impossible at this point the hype cycle has gotten to the point where the pr materials from the scams and the pr materials from the real technologists are almost identical so we are at a point where you need technical guidance to be able to distinguish what is viable and credible from political nonsense what is viable and credible is likely to wind up running the world what is nonsense is doing a very good job of pretending this okay I mentioned that right so let's talk about what the large-scale impact of this is um right now civilization is basically defined as an interlocking network of rule sets governance systems so having software that has the ability to automate rules and automate compliance with rules is inherently very interesting because it potentially takes one of the core operating costs of society which is creation and maintenance of rule structures and compliance with rule structures and it offers the possibility of automating you could potentially partially automate away the cost of running civilization and this might be as big a transition as the transition from say barter to money the idea that once upon time we had to manually remember the law and that all of this stuff was stored on paper books to Future civilizations went crazy well isn't the wall pieces software where you describe what you want to do and it tells you whether it's okay no no the law used to be on paper we used to experts in law wow that's bizarre and you know that sounds very strange and ambitious now but the idea that you could digitize small in the same way that we digitized Maps is actually not that unreasonable if you talk to the artificial intelligence people so the possibility for mechanizing Law and mechanizing compliance should be taken very seriously as a potential huge breakthrough in our fundamental economics it's probably worth a few percent of GDP um similarly you could think of all of these blockchain startups as being essentially rural entrepreneurs I come up with a set of rules for managing an electrical grid here's our soul word the solar will be represented by coins the coins will be exchanged so that the amount of solar is never oversold and we have a compliance framework built into that he's a rural entrepreneurs they're making up sets of rules supporting those [20:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFVuccuHI8&t=1220s) rules with software and then launching these rule sets into the world essentially it's freelance governance and I think that that's extremely interesting the idea that we have an industry which is governance as a service covers the vast majority of the blockchain startups which are out there and I think the government should be very excited about that because it potentially gives government the ability to offload a lot of the work of managing new technology onto new technology now making sure that citizen interest are properly represented in those processes is going to be a big difficult job but if we can just about regulate the banking system we ought to be able to keep these startups in what right just about regularly the benefit system um one of the other issues is that these rural entrepreneurs tend to be Global by default unless you specifically work very hard to stop people getting access to a role set if they live in one country the rules have internet scope and this is where we begin to see a lot of grinding pressure between the inherently globalist nature of anything deployed on the internet and the national nature of the vast majority of the rules that we're attempting to manage and that grinding surface between the kind of implicit internet globalism and National interest is I think one of the most interesting areas that we're going to be dealing with for the next few years you should also be noted that most of the companies who are rolling out these kind of infrastructure was small they've got the same basic shape as web design firms not the same basic shape as Banks so you have small teams of people without deep legal expertise rolling out rule sets that were intended to change the world and you know thinking in terms of global platforms and that mismatch between the ambition of these entities and their legal depth is causing a lot of the confusion in the blockchain space but how much entrepreneurialism do you want if we want aggressive entrepreneurialism we're going to have to accept there's a certain amount of chaos and where that balance is is a political question this is a thing for regulators and legislators to decide how much chaos can we tolerate um the the thing that we're attempting to prevent is enormous meltdowns so if we wound up with Ponzi schemes put to wound up with you know half a percent or a percent of global reserves in them you can imagine the instability in those things would become very dangerous uh if bitcoin's value crimes from being say 25 billion today to 20 uh two or three trillion tomorrow over the course of say another year or two at what point do we decide that it's just too dangerous that that much money [22:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFVuccuHI8&t=1370s) sloshing around in a bucket with these attributes is there a point where you begin to apply deflationary pressure to bitcoin to try and deflate that bubble or do we accept that global trade is just going to be demarcated in Funny Money you see these decisions have to be made they have to be made by global consensus and it's very hard to know what the right decision is if we're facing Global challenges on climate maybe you need a Global Currency to face Global challenges if so should it be issued by Bitcoin should it be issued by the U.N should it be issued by the IMF the World Bank shouldn't all be issued at all huge questions very very deep political value in political philosophy that we're going to be forced to make decisions on relatively rapidly uh I think we basically covered ultimate well set up robot counter robot the thing which would be most useful in all of this is if we had a mechanical representations of law it would allow people to figure out whether what they wanted to do was compliant or not compliant very very cheaply um this is an enormously powerful New Growth area and the more work that can be done on creating software definitions of war that would allow people to automatically check whether their plans are compliant the better the future will be I think the idea that we have to dramatically reduce the cost and the incidental costs are complying with law to make it easier and easier and easier for people to actually stay within the circuit and seems to be one of the most exciting things which is happening now a lot of work is happening in Singapore the term is smart statutes but this is something that I would encourage over almost all the other things that we could be thinking about how do we get the law to catch up with the technology so that we bring the cost of compliance down so that we can have Innovation at the same time as we remain compliant globalization 2.0 so pushing forward on this compliance attribute this compliance angle um if you have well-managed uh repositories of digital War it ought to be possible to cut the cost of compliance so that we essentially remove non-tariff barriers while retaining local control global trade local regulation computers handle the red tape and the idea that you could represent what happens at Border in the software so I can basically say okay if I take this product and try and move it down this route and sell it in this market where do I run into trouble and the software tells me what your label is wrong and you're going to need to pay this tariff then I can look at that [25:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFVuccuHI8&t=1520s) process before I have to actually put my goods onto a truck I can essentially simulate a behavior and then figure out whether that behavior will be compliant with the law but that it will get me the result that I want um if we had a world in which there was a lot of law represented in this way it would dramatically facilitate trade particularly when countries change their policies because you could change your policy because the computers would be updated everybody would understand what has shifted as it affected their businesses essentially the automatic notification and then businesses could adopt and life could continue so I'm hugely in favor of internationalization by virtue of digitization of Law and I think that we will look back and see that this was an inevitable Trend progress is initially slow but in the long run this is as important as poor infrastructure the idea that you have a national representation of your legal codes that will allow people to test a product or a service against statute before they enter the market this seems something with hindsight very obvious um and this we just were a concept we call internet of agreements right as things currently stand we only have proper full digital representation of credit card payments and that's given us a 20-year growth industry the internet agreements model if we bring the rest of the payment infrastructure online so that we can have stocks bonds and all the rest of these things in NATO digital representations how much economic growth does this create but how do we then represent National borders so that we don't simply have internet native financial instruments crashing through National sovereignty and this is the interface I think is best managed with digital law we have Internet Native Instruments which are then rendered down into compliant forms by essentially legal oracles this is very much 10-year Horizon Vision but if we don't start taking proactive steps to bring the full weight of technology behind rule of war and behind lowering the cost of building increasingly complex Global architectures we will discover that the technology is dragging us rather than us leading the technology um I wanted to buy about two years ago and designed the national blockchain strategy the national blockchain strategy of Dubai was very straightforward issue all government documents on a blockchain so that the government can register and understand its own documents uh Dubai then put a [27:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFVuccuHI8&t=1670s) 200 million dollar fund behind that vision and behind their General Vision of proactively engaging between government and the future all run through an organization called the Dubai Futures Foundation um this sort of approach is then proactively building a trading relationship with the future they want to become a kind of future Port where ideas are imported from the domain of potential into the domain of reality and then exported from Dubai to the rest of the world that kind of future poor infrastructure is quite Capital intensive but it also has enormous benefits in terms of Keynesian spending and Improvement in education and skilled labor availability so even though most of the money spent important ideas from the future is wasted it is only wasted once because on the second pass you get a skilled labor force and it's very important that we think in these kind of terms because we don't get better at pulling things from the future to the present other countries will continue to accelerate and we will lose our position one of the possibilities is that these are the first waves of Technology to it to genuine Palm European response as possible as one of my co-workers Rob Knight says if we were implementing mobile phones today Europe would simply have its own country code you dial 9-0 or whatever it would be for Europe and any phone in Europe would ring we've got that opportunity with blockchain there's no need for every single Sovereign entity inside of Europe to build its own blockchain technology There's an opportunity for shared technical infrastructure upon European level which would be an enormous binder together of the European block and I don't think there's any reason to have the inefficiency of myriad incompatible National systems it was really the first technological change where Europe has been fully stood up and fully ready to actually build at that kind of level in enormous Supernatural way um I think we can skip this we understand the potential flu institutions we've talked about the potential and we talked a lot about the details I think we're basically done uh yes the deepling of the single Market again relatively obvious as principle if you have the ability to do things like track and Trace for physical Goods appointment manufacturer that system could be pan-european and it could give the European trading block a set of technical capabilities that would be unique in the rest of the world the ability to fully understand what your goods are to understand where they came from to understand where they're going is exactly the kind of subject [30:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFVuccuHI8&t=1820s) which would serve underlying European political agendas like environmental concerns but without putting us in a position of having to do a sort of Brute Force legislation you build the platforms at the pond European level and then European business simply builds out onto those structures that should be basically the last slide so that's the fundamental takeaway the blockchain is a machine's rules [Applause] yes thank you very much for this impressive introduction to our topic partly sort of very much talking about the present partly trying to pull very very hard the future in our Direction and I think it was helpful it was inspiring and and it's a good way to to to kick off our discussion and I think [31:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEFVuccuHI8&t=1880s) in your closing remarks you um very well described the inherent tension between the European project bringing countries together within the EU and the global project with whether you started with which you started uh saying well in in England it's all games to be Global in any case and that's attention we are grappling with not only in the context of of the blockchain but certainly we will also be grappling with it in that context so so I I think I think that was very helpful um and a very good Global but at the same time very European and inspiring so thank you very much so what we will do now is we will head straight because when we we don't want to fall behind too far in our timing we had --- End of [265] European Parliament blockchain presentation May 2017. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [263](https://guptaoption.com/texts/263.md) Ethereal Summit (2017); the most closely related, [706](https://guptaoption.com/texts/706.md) Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin - with Vinay Gupta | Virtual... (2018); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.