# Jon Husband (Wirearchy inventor) and Vinay Gupta discuss blockchains, governance, (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [279], 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/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2016-06-13 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- 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): States the need to define explicit material minimums, the aim behind life support at zero budget.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - 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)
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (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)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (17%); Open government & anti-corruption (17%); blockchain / global / internet (10%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: oracles (5 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); The DAO (4 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); DAO (4 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); social order (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); basic income (2 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); global democracy (1 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Spiral (1 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); VICE (1 here; 19 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 2 undated); standards (3 here; 87 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); rule of law (1 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.23 (1.00 is the top), number 329 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [572] [How To Address Climate Change: Diplomacy, Politics,... (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/572.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
  - [747] [Startup Societies Podcast - Episode 34 - Vinay Gupta (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/747.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
- On the same works, just before: [863] [Vinay Gupta - Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/863.md); [282] [Wales 1 (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/282.md); [283] [Digital Bauhaus 2016 backup camera footage (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/283.md)
- On the same works, just after: [278] [Thoughts on the DAO (1) - it takes a lot of people to... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/278.md); [734] [Blockchain: Beyond Bitcoin by Vinay Gupta @leashless... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/734.md); [277] [a thesis: hexayurt guy capital partners? (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/277.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: Jon Husband (Wirearchy inventor) and Vinay Gupta discuss blockchains, governance,, video, 2016-06-13, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [279], https://guptaoption.com/texts/279.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=0s) John husband welcome to my house thank you V it's a pleasure we've become friends over the last couple years and uh it's wonderful to be London looking out over the green trees and the reservoirs uh thanks for having me and look forward to interesting talks so tell me what's on your mind this morning what's on my mind is what's on my mind all the time which is uh we're living through you know it's it's kind of bow to say but we're living through an epocal uh change in the way things are organized and done in the world uh and so I walk through life uh watching listening looking at patterns uh trying to understand what's going on so you're best known for this concept Waki which you came up with a number of years ago yeah um so my understanding of w Rocky is basically it's a name for what people actually do in terms of governance and social organization and networks rather than being a prescription that it's kind of observation Le rather than being this is how we ought to do it Manifesto Le is that right uh I would say that that's one way of coming up to the subject uh to be to be as precise as I know how to be I worked for many years uh with large organizations uh helping them Define roles jobs structure org charts as we know it um and the society that we live

[1:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=86s) in today virtually everything we do is built on some notion of hierarchy we've come through 75 or 100 Years of the last stage of the Industrial Revolution looking for efficiency and optimizing and so on uh and the methods that are in place everywhere around the world now for organizing work and organizing people's activities organizing business models organizing government are based on hierarchy I about close to 20 years ago 17 years ago to be spe specific one day was sitting around thinking about how knowledge and information particularly as it was beginning to become connected by the the web would change this relationship uh hierarchy is posited on the fact that knowledge is information and knowledge is arranged vertically and used top down by people that know more than anyone else does about something and this this is a very Buckman FL thing right Bucky talks about in grunch of giants yeah this idea that what defines hierarchy is the uh the Kings would concentrate all the information about running of the Kingdom in only their hands so the military never knew the condition of the treasury the treasury never knew the disposition of forces nobody other than the king understood the Strategic alliances so anybody displac the king wouldn't have the information they needed to succeed I'm glad you brought that up I I think it goes back even further than that and and here's my story the day that this word

[2:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=178s) wire Archy the Ary of living in a wired world popped into my head uh was at the beginning of a career crisis cuz I had quit my job as a consultant helping uh do that for one of the world's large firms and um was thinking about all this stuff this word popped into my head the first thing I did was got out of the shower I was in the shower went to a dictionary and looked for the word hierarchy and some words have a number of definitions in the in the dictionary hierarchy is one of them the first definition of hierarchy is the relationship between God and the archangels really yes good war and if you stop to think about how we've progressed through into modern society since then what we had at the time of Christ's purported death the the dividing line between BC and AD is we had Clans and tribes operating all around the world as the social units and the people that became the leaders of the Clans and tribes were either the strongest or the smartest or both both they as we moved through history became kings and queens sure sure and families we have a family here in in London that still runs the king and the queen or the queen and the prince Big Liz and her friends Big Liz and her friends um and during the Middle Ages Along came a concept called the divine right of kings yes in other words God was giving his or her knowledge to the representatives on Earth which were the kings and queens to do with as they saw fit and the knowledge was captured by the cortis which were the the Cardinals and the Bishops telling their monks the scribblers to write down the knowledge that was important what's really important to realize then is with the divine right of kings there was this notion that God's knowledge was enshrined in the kings that gave them the power to rule yes and then Along Came the Gutenberg printing press in 1462 absolutely and you know popularly or colloquially it's known as beginning to spread knowledge around but of course it took two or three hundred years to work its way through society and there were many book burnings because books represented power absolutely now here we

[5:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=310s) are with the internet this this is one of the reasons I say to people you know the political transformation caused by the internet hasn't even started correct right I think you know whether it's a good political transformation or a not so good political transformation is a different issue and we will find out someday or maybe you and I won't maybe we'll be dead by the time it happens well I mean certainly the surveillance stuff is very real but so are all the revolutions that were organized online exactly we have this polarity happening now and one of the men I work with in Quebec Michelle Kier who I argue is the frankophone world's equivalent to Marshall mclan in some ways okay uh suggests that we now have a fourth source of power before it was the church the state and the corporation okay the fourth source of power is public opinion which is shaped on the web that's For Better or Worse that's interesting and you'll see all sorts of examples now a.org for example I remember a piece that went around now when was this must been shortly after 911 talking about uh there being a you know second superpow Jim Moore yeah second superp power James if you Google it it's still around it disappeared from a number of blogs but it's basically saying the world connected up eventually you know the the long Arc of History points towards justice points towards democracy whatever Alvin tooffer wrote a lot about this in the book future uh not future shock but Power shift y knowledge wealth and violence at the edge of the 21st century and Rumble writes about it a lot as well um you University of Hawaii the democide guy talks about the Democratic peace yeah this notion that you know no two countries with the McDonald's whoever invaded each other yeah which I think ceased to be true I can't remember exactly where it was at got invaded that h of McDonald's but there was some place that got invaded that h of McDonald's but what's interesting the most recent let's say example of this is the is which has been relatively quiet actually is the Panama papers you know that's quite a high bar for relatively quiet uh yeah but you know the the AR the counterarguments have already come that we're not doing anything illegal and so on now the question is should the laws be changed

[7:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=441s) what I believe one of the best uh things that ever happened believe it or not because of Facebook is that there is an and I it's a bit of a pun bit by bit there's an accumulated weight and impact of the awareness of this kind of information it of course depends upon who follows you and who you follow there's lots of garbage on the internet and Cat gifts and so on but it also is in a funny way becoming activism Central oh I think it's already I mean it's being established as tivism Central for many years and so now the question is we we tend to analyze things things very quickly and say well it's going to be like this but I'm really wondering what the world will be like in the year 2025 after another 10 years of hyperlinks plus another 10 years of surveillance I was going to say I mean the pivot on this seems to be that it's activism Central but it's also surveillance Central yes so you know the notion that you do your primary activist organizing in an environment where you're constantly under the watchful eye seems unlikely to produce fundamental change well the question that remains in my mind I think basically I'm not as optimistic as I'd like to be there's a the the working definition of hierarchy is neutral it's I I've posited it as an organizing principle back to your an emergent organizing principle back to your question and that's a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority You could argue that's underway mhm based on knowledge trust credibility and a focus on results now each of those so let me

[8:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=538s) break that down knowledge trust credibility hang on so let me so knowledge is pretty straightforward trust and credibility are separated they're two separate things in your model let's talk about that a bit okay trust credibility and finally either a focus on results if I'm talking to corporate people or a focus on generating economic and social value okay got it now um I'd say each of those four elements is a generic phrase and and thousands of books have been written about each one of them so they can all be unpacked layered over that is context context context context so why the separation between knowled uh credibility and trust trust is for me remembering that we are social animals remember we were talking about lock versus Hobs which I think ultimately this all backs into um is a fundamentally human thing and as is credibility but credibility is trust backed up with demonstrable facts reliability ET ET so this is trust but verify so trust is so trust is what happens before you've got results credibility is what happens after you've got results um and what we have now in places like or new we've we've heard a lot about this emergent platform capitalism Uber Airbnb and so on what we're starting to see all around and we're going to have this in blockchain as well is a certain threshold level of trust let's call it credibility baked into the interface right right we have this to some degree with web browsers now right exct you have https it tells you very clearly that you know you're paying attention to you know this is Amazon this is Google we verified it you have your padl you're okay except that it's run by Amazon and Google as opposed to run by open source uh or some kind of entity that is not profit oriented so I

[10:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=659s) mean this brings us directly around to the blockchain and its enormous potential for transformation of stuff um so I mean you know I'm assuming most of the people that watch this will have some familiarity with the blockchain but I'll give you the nickel summary just in case people don't basically 1970s we have the age of databases one computer per organization 1990 the age of networks one computer per person and at the tail end of that we get the kind of cloud era which is many computers per person tied together by the cloud and then you get the blockchain can of 2010 onwards which is basically one single Global computer starting in a very simple form of Bitcoin then rolling onto ethereum and then rolling on with a little bit of like to the scaled versions of ethereum which will be super computer fast uh but as a single Computing surface made of all these little machines but connected together in such a way that it's a seamless hole rather than being lots and lots and lots of independent units so this is the this is the big vision and inside of of that context the notion that you could take a single Global database like what URLs you know what certificate what key goes with amazon.com what key goes with Google what key goes with Yahoo what key goes with Apple so that you know if a message arrives from Apple that it really came from Apple all that sort of stuff seems like a natural fit for the blockchain the hard part is how do we authenticate how do we verify who should be on Apple right I mean you know whose job is it to make sure that the key that we have for Apple's actually Apple's key because if you're not paying for that service who's going to authenticate well this is why I'm glad that I'm we're talking about this because for the for the following reasons I am not a technologist I barely understand what you just said I do because I do pay attention and I'm trying to impact understand the impacts but I'm more of a sociologist Anthropologist and what I see thus far with the blockchain is a great deal of Interest increasing amounts of money being gathered together to put various forms and iterations of blockchain architecture into being but it's mostly all technologists and Men or people with money in their eyes um and relatively little attention being paid to ethics governance the resultant

[13:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=795s) sociologies joyo has expressed recently some concern about that and what I think is that again if you parse the working definition of hierarchy a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge trust credibility and know focus on results it maps onto or lines quite closely with what we can expect from blockchain architecture particularly as it moves out of the financial services area and into education government Healthcare uh Community organizations etc etc as it sweeps through Society we'll have the user and service provider both and engaged in an interactive exchange of power and authority through the verification through the identification and you will be capturing uh because of the context in which uh a blockchain architecture is used for example in notorized legal documents around real estate you're capturing the pertinent knowledge you're establishing a threshold level of trust you've got automatic credibility because of the register and you generate a result a transaction is completed this is yeah this is interesting territory um so in the existing technosocial systems that we have right now the fundamental question is always who owns the server what but if you go back to generation before that the question was who owned the code right so Stallman basically frees us from this notion that Microsoft owns the code therefore it doesn't matter whose computer you're running you're still running their software your software that's ancient history now well to some degree but the proprietary push back you know Apple came very close to Monopoly for example on smartphones right and and if it hadn't been for Google and Android that would have been a monopoly right now we have two actors one of the mainly closed Source apple one of the mainly open source Google and Android but Google keeps taking away little parts of the open of Android I understand that and then Microsoft invests in Cogen to try and make sure that there's still an open alternative that that's Microsoft so you know we've only just by the skin of our teeth made it into that terrain where we had openness on phones openness on computers I mean the truth is a lot of people have switched back to Apple even in the open source so here's a here's a naive question for you with Advanced or let's say next Generation browsers and some of their capabilities could the blockchain become an operating system um that is a much more interesting

[15:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=945s) question than you think it is okay I I

[15:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=948s) mean I'm lost there but I just it came to my head well so an operating system is a computer you know it's a piece of software that you wrap around Hardware right to give you a set of kind of smoother interfaces so that when you want to read file things well so you want to read a file off the dis you don't have to go and individually program the drive head to move you know 2.4 CM across the surface to this wheel you know to this ring that kind of stuff it's all obscured by the software so you could think of the blockchain as being an interface an operating system right for many computers right that gives you the abstraction that those many computers is are actually one perfect computer right right so in a sense the blockchain is actually an operating system and I think as we go further down this path of scaled blockchains it'll become increasingly operating system like because we've got more and more and more and more functions which are being represented through the blockchain so there in my futurist oriented imagination or framework and keeping in mind the arrival of the printing press and that it took two or 3 hundred years for the real effects of the of the press and books and so on magazines to have impact on society and bring us to earlier form I mean democracy came from a long time ago but I'm thinking of given the way technology accelerates through Society now in 50 years could the blockchain and browsers bring these elements of what I call hierarchy really to bear in a fundamentally different Society with fundamentally different Power structure

[17:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=1049s) now I know that many many people will argue that and and to a large extent I agree humans need hierarchy and we have always fought tooth and nail Wars to establish power and dominance and control and I don't expect that to disappear overnight you know at all human nature is not changing yeah but human nature is always we're still living at least not until the transhumanists arrive well you know there's that question and but we're still I would say arguing over the the very deep definitions of opposing definitions of human nature brought about in the late 17th century John Lock and Thomas hubs yeah man is a social animal versus there is no such thing as Society you need uh society and a state to control this animal on two legs mhh so where we get to with the blockchain is this notion that if you have essentially perfect bureaucracy then what you will get is an improvement in society yeah everybody will be fair cuz you have to be fair because it's recorded and well I mean it's not necessarily that they'll be fair but it's the cheating has to happen at a lower level than a higher level so for example right it's the cheating is not baked into the business models that are exploitive well think of Breton Woods right you take the entire cultural standard that we'd had for thousands of years the gold was money and you basically continue the paper which is originally a way of Simply making gold convenient VI you abstract away the gold by basically selling it on the markets to pay the government's debts World War II and once it's paper and is representative of that idea then you can start creating Financial derivatives you get inflation you get inflation and you get financial derivatives that bear less and less and less reality to the actual value abs and this whole process starts with Bretton Woods right right because once you give governments the ability to inflate then they can print money when they run out of money which is basically a tax on savings yep right and that ability for the governments to silently tax and say well you know we can't control inflation well you control money supply therefore you control inflation the ability to trim off that kind of fraud is very core to the blockchain vision but what people build on top of that you know the original sort of blockchain folks were very much libertarian Hardline American libertarian that was the original Bitcoin ideology right the ethereum folks are a bit more pro-social about B more European model left green what the

[19:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=1199s) Canadian Canadian yeah exactly right H folk of the pirate party again this kind of Democratic Socialist Norm so you get

[20:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=1208s) a very different Future model of how everything should work when you've got people with those kind of political opinions is the people writing the software cuz fundamentally it's ultimately going to be about power so 70s model right you buy the hardware from IBM or somebody else but you're always going to wind up running Microsoft software on after 80s model but anyway you see I'm say right the software vendor because the software was proprietary had all the power Stallman comes and breaks that shackle with open source and we're still fighting to keep open source at parity with commercial operating systems but there's no doubt at all it's a viable fallback we got that far little bit further down the line we then get into a position where um you know how I say this exactly it's is slippery so you break the Paradigm that the computer that you're using has a specific brand of hardware by standardization of the Hardware open source then frees you from commercial control the software right but where you get into in the blockchain game is the software is open but because all the computers are running the same standards when you want to get any kind of change you either need an enormous number of cats to simultaneously decide that they're going to sleep in you know their baskets now and everybody upgrades the software at the same time or you wind up in a position where you get arbitrary Central points like Bitcoin Foundation telling people that they have to upgrade and then you get political struggles around the synchronization of the standards so it seems like whatever we do we get higher level centralizations you know the systems get more and more free but you get more and more abstract and the ultimate I think agreed upon centralizer in our societies at least in the western world are is Law and I found it interesting that a month or two ago when I was here with you at the dinner there was on on one side of a long table in the boardroom of the world's second largest law firm uh uh a bunch of blockchain hackers and activists and on the other side of the table were four senior Partners from law firms and deans of the two important uh University it schools in London they were trying to figure out what's happening here oh yeah because ultimately what goes on will be somehow regulated and controlled controlled by law well have to be maybe maybe not I

[22:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=1348s) mean I've been in that meeting right you know variations of it UK government you know the UN the Red Cross the universities the big law firms the big four everybody is trying to get their heads around it and this is a multi-step process because what people forget is how political the original Foundation well and so your point maybe maybe not is probably a good point to end because I think we're close to no we got we got few minutes the maybe maybe not thing is very interesting because of course quite rapidly let's think of Internet time and I think in many ways quite prematurely um we're being pressed to come up with answers to these new set of conditions I've had thousands of people ask me well you know what's the method for w Archy and I keep refusing to answer this I say it's an emergent organizing principle depends on context what you want to get done what your culture is etc etc but the maybe maybe not brings up the notion of with hyperlinks and there's clearly more more impetus to pull into most initiatives various aspects of self-organizing self organizing work systems self-organizing which in a context we call daos right daos decentralized autonomous organizations you agree on the rules of the game you publish the rules of the game you automatically maintain the rules of the game well and the automatically there's a lot contained in that but as you know you you and I are both part of uh ostensibly uh an autonomous Network or organization called ethos there's also in spiral in New Zealand and there will be more and more coming along and there are cities that are beginning to look at you know in Barcelona and Madrid there is more and more activity coming from the Grassroots coming bottom up because people are saying we want to say yes I am generally the very skeptical of those movements because I think that in a lot of cases we replace democratically Fair procedure uh with Cult of Personality or with um the ter of structural lessness I generally agree with that where I might take issue with you is that in most places what are de the the issue today is what is De democratically elected and put into place has very often been corrupted oh I mean I'm not necessarily talking about democracy in the sense of fouryear electoral democracy but the notion that you have an enshrined set of procedures which Define fair and if you follow the procedures this is fair there's a very long history I mean democracy didn't occur overnight right

[24:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=1498s) but the notion that what you want is Rule of laws rather than men what I see in a lot of the bottom up stuff is that you wind up with rule of men yes you wind up in a position where the most charismatic personalities are running the show well that reminds us of clay

[25:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=1511s) sher's power law exactly for sure is the people that are either more articulate more forceful in their personality more charismatic more active luck or just dumb luck some lot of that coincidence and it's and I think there's not a coincidence that it's quite popular at the moment television shows like Vikings and Game of Thrones yeah yeah but but this question of whether bottom up organization has to include Cult of Personality as a factor right the Hope on the blockchain is that you could basically have bottomup organizations that are ruled by law rather than ruled by personality that you establish a set of voting procedures you establish a set of property rights you stri set your Rules of Engagement and the because the Machinery is abstract because it's not running on somebody's operating system or somebody's Hardware because it's embedded in something that's beyond our control that in some way what you will get from this is a a a rule of law in a position where otherwise you would have a rule of Personality well I expect to see some essays articles and books about that and what I personally would love to hear would be what Manuel de Castells would say about blockchain architecture and its use in society because he's as far as I he's certainly probably the preeminent n network theorist in my in my mind um but I mean it's going to have to be explored because I don't think the blockchain architecture is going to go away and I think it's going to get funded and be put into various initiatives in all sorts of fields uh MIT media lab has already uh put into place an experiment I was reading about the other day you may have read it about um granting academic certification using the blockchain which is a really good use it's a good use you know married to makes universities even more nervous I would think well yes I there's also all the open bget stuff from Milla that's overdue to be blockchained um shall we do hubs versus uh in a little more detail in part two because I think that getting to the bottom of this model of how does our model of human nature affect how we see technology is a really good piece of heavy lifting that we could do just to set a bit of context

[27:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=1642s) let me read out um a contrast between lock and Thomas Hobs who are both very influential in terms of their Reflections on human nature is as follows Lock's considerable importance in political thought is better known as the first systematic theorist of the philosophy of liberalism Lo exercised enormous influence in both England and America in his two traes of government 1690 lock set forth the view that the state exists to preserve the natural rights of its citizens when governments fail in that task citizens have the right and sometimes the duty to withdraw their support and even to Rebel lock opposed Thomas hobb's view that the original state of nature was nasty brutish and short and that individuals through a social contract surrendered for the sake of self-preservation their rights to State and control and I think uh as we were talking about earlier I mean you know the thinking about High Archy uh God possessing the knowledge the relationship with the archangels that being um humanized if you will and brought down to Earth from heaven in the guise of kings and queens the divine right of kings I would argue that today um corporate Executives uh presidents and vice presidents are Kings Cardinals and Bishops yeah no doubt I mean the notion that what you have is a feudalism where rather than the underlying asset being led the underlying asset is pattern yes right you have you have a piece of property which is essentially pulled by Discovery instead of going to an island and finding the land you go into the unknown you patent something you then rent people the use of the patent in the same way that the Lords used to rent people use of land yeah and the result of this is a direct Recreation of feudalism but on an intellectual property basis rather than a physical property basis patents and monopolistic Andor oligopolistic positions in markets that are then supported by uh mainstream law right an antitrust antitrust so on and so for nobody used antitrust effectively in decades and we have you know the the progress out of the Second Industrial Revolution into today's modern society the Advent of what we understand as credit offered through Banks Banks positions of power yeah these are all arguably ways of controlling man The

[29:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=1792s) Social Animal into forms and patterns that have evolved through the years years now what the reason we're talking about this today is because does having something called the internet the web and hyperlinks and blockchain architecture does this change this game at all or not well I mean the case you made very convincingly before is that the printing press did change the game because the previous took a long time took a long time but the point of control where you know the Church Controlled access to the word of God you know that was that was a 1700 year mon yep L AR were there were there atheists back then at all were you allowed to be or were you burned at the stake well all was burn at the sake you know Galileo and the rest of that you didn't even have to be an atheist you just had to be non you know outside of the Dogma right a lot of use of force to keep that Doctrine in place yeah so we get to the

[30:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=1847s) present you know there's no denying that the network is radically changing people's access to knowledge um the whole phenomena that doctors went through about 10 years ago will begin getting to encounter patients who'd read about their disorder on the internet and came in already with a headful of opinions um yeah there are two kinds of doctors there the ones that are still annoyed when you don't treat them as God and then there's a kind like I'm the kind of person that you know reads up a great deal and I'm not stupid about something if it's bothering me and I'll go in and talk to the doctor and luckily I've had doctors that like having a conversation with an informed patient absolutely but it changes the power relationship absolutely and that sort of rule and then you patient self organization so you know whole communities of Interest exactly forums and in the long run that could easily turn into funding collaborative funding of research voila especially if you start thinking about how to use the blockchain intelligently there and this is where we get around to the ability to build these new power structures right so I mean there's this thing running in uh on ethereum right now called the Dao and um as of I mean where are we middle of June 2016 they've got on the order of what $150 million I thought it was edged closer to 200 if the last thing I heard but it's an obscene amount a lot of money right pulled together by uh a very simple Democratic model of venture capital with no clear purpose or objectives particularly yet other than to provide funding for initiatives that are yet to be conceived and to generate return on investment and to demonstrate that a new form of organization is possible a decentralized autonomous organization so right now they've basically put kind of a hole on that because the DAO was not really foreseen as being something that would wind up with that much value in it right so there's been a certain amount of like this would have been okay with 5 mil with 150 or 200 we kind of need to take a bit more of a look at this so you know more about this than me so who's the Wii and who took that decision to put it on hold ah well now right so as we saw with Bitcoin you know just because you release something doesn't mean that there's no point of authority that would automat ially reform so in the DAO the people that released the code are not Anonymous so Stefan to and his two partners in SL are the people that made the announcements okay there's also a committee around the DAO uh whose job it is to basically verify that when submissions come in they're not fraudulent in principle that the person who has said that they are

[33:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=1997s) making the submission is actually making the submission so there's a gatekeeper there are some Gatekeepers um and this is just as well because that's what's buying time to do the analysis whether the was sufficiently sec to go to Mar don't get me wrong I I you know often when we talked about hierarchy people have often asked me or they think because it sounds like hierarchy but they you know everybody knows something is up that it means the demise of hierarchy or the death of hierarchy I've never said that I never will say that

[33:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=2025s) but what I do believe is that in Committees of governance and in virtually all forms of human activity what we are going to need and see is more in intelligent more enlightened more feedback driven hierarchies that exist in ecosystems they will be more temporary more fluid but they will be there yeah and I think that we've seen inside of the uh Bitcoin and ethereum spaces repeated attempts to construct these kind of interim hierarchies so in Bitcoin the people with the political power are the miners because whether they choose to upgrade their software or not defines how the network operates yeah until the limit of the number of Bitcoins that can be mined greet is reached yeah but for now the miners are the ones cracking the and the inability to get the Bitcoin foundation and the miners on the same page a fundamental level has been you know the fundamental problem that you couldn't get enough centralization to make the platform go forward right um so Bitcoin has found it very hard to innovate well you use the word centralization and I and I'll never forget this would be back in 1999 when I was just starting to scribble down some notes about about hierarchy the last chap the last paragraph in Chapter 3 of a book called future perfect by a business theorist by the name of Stan Davis yeah said that information systems and networks would permit the both the centralization and the decentralization simultaneously of activities and therefore hierarchies and networks would coexist under some principle that would that is encompassing of both and in my opinion that's hierarchy or the way I've defined I don't want to be as presumptuous uh or arrogant you know I think it was a reasonably clever idea but I'll always remember that paragraph about centralization and decentralization simultaneously y That's what information systems Network together permits yeah and I mean the blockchain is a really good example of that because the decentralization is enormous in that all of these different machines are all doing their own piece and the points of centralization our mission critical because this is where the code is produced so one argument is that you could decentralize this by having lots of different implementations of the software so different languages produced by different people different implementations here's your Java version here's your P your python version here's your a horizontal Tower of Babble yeah and but with intercompatibility between the networks but you still wind up with

[36:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=2175s) this platform thing where okay we might have 21's implementations of the platform but the platform itself then becomes the centralized thing right because it doesn't matter what version of the client you're running you're still running the same protocol so you end up with centralization on a single protocol and the notion that you've got you know technical decentralization about protocol level centralization it seems that we just continue to climb this ladder of doesn't matter what the decentralizing force is there's always a centralizing force that comes along with it so to come back to where we started

[36:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzB9qG0sJA&t=2206s) here in terms of reflecting on the fundamental polarity posed by lock versus Hobs my question to myself myself and to you and to anyone else that's interested is will we always be wrestling with this fundamental issue of human nature as to whether or not it's a social animal that is evolved I mean we can get into will Baran theory about integral spiraling up towards greater Consciousness or will we always be nasty in tooth and Claw um and need mechanisms to mediate conflict in order to keep some degree of social order before we kill all kill each other you know I guess I'd argue is that it's probably some of both and always will be so my Escape Route on this the thing that has really giving me sort of a profound sense of you know a just future being possible is I don't think the critical issue is actually inequality I think it's quality of life for the worst sure but that ties into Buckminster Fuller's aphorism I think often that says you know his goal is 100% sustainable future for all of humankind or whatever the the statement is and if you can set a threshold for the lowest of the the worst that is acceptable in a moral sense precisely then we're getting somewhere because if you come at this from the notion that what you're trying to create is equality the problem with equality is it requires huge architectures of control right because things like power law distribution seem to keep reemerging whatever your medium is if humans have freedom to choose they seem to construct power wall hierarchies yes you know factor of 10 between the most popular and the let's face it some people are more driven and want want want want and some people are less driven or driven by different things and they're all in some ways reflections of that that dichotomy yeah but I mean most of the work that I've seen with for example in simulations suggests that the power wall stuff reemerges even with random it just seems to be in the math so if you focus on bringing up the level of the poorest and the least well off to a level that we consider acceptable if you have that as a plat as a as an objective principle in the same way that free speech is a principle it's possible to design implementation mechanisms that do not then crop the wings of the highest flying too much isn't that though this

---
Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/279-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [279] Jon Husband (Wirearchy inventor) and Vinay Gupta discuss blockchains, governance,, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.