# Vinay Gupta Digital 2016 Newport Wales (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [280], 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, 2016-06-07 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo. 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): Ledger-layer commentary.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - People's Cloud architecture and futures in 1000 words (2013): Blog essay: the data center is doomed, its efficiency is bought with centralization and monitoring, and...
  - 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)
  - 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:
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, 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)
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (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: blockchain / global / internet (41%); Information markets — universal registers and digital twins (14%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: speed of light (4 here; 20 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); peer-to-peer (3 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); equity crowdfunding (2 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); uPort (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); The DAO (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); IPFS (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); life extension (1 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); proof of stake (1 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); smart contracts (4 here; 110 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); DAO (1 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2014)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): The DAO; uPort
- Importance: core-text score 0.32 (1.00 is the top), number 227 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [83] [People’s Cloud architecture and futures in 1000 words |... (2013)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/83.md): same career work: People's Cloud architecture and futures in 1000 words
  - [562] [Vinay Gupta at The Promise of the Blockchain 2015 (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/562.md): close in content (cosine 0.97)
- On the same works, just before: [291] Interview with Sam Warburton of RWE about blockchains,... (2016); [766] [Start Talks Vinay Gupta (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/766.md); [378] [Vinay Gupta Live Stream (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/378.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); [719] [Cyberpunk to blockchains: Cultural history of... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/719.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: Vinay Gupta Digital 2016 Newport Wales, video, 2016-06-07, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [280], https://guptaoption.com/texts/280.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo&t=0s) for 2015 what I talked a lot about was uh the possibility that Equity crowdfunding was going to turn out to be an enormous enormous Force inside of this whole Space you know I I give a very ambitious very aggressive talk it was basically just e crowdfunding is going to change everything get ready here it comes and sure enough you know we've got $160 million equivalent in an equity crowdfunding type platform called the DAO which is started right here in the US UK by the socket gu so with that

[0:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo&t=30s) kind of emboldening my sense I want to make some predictions I'm going to try and talk about what I think the next year will hold in the entire crypto space as a little bit of a kind of State of the Union uh for those of you that don't know me uh I was um I'm currently with ConsenSys as basically a strategic architect which means I spent the majority of my time figuring out how to explain these Technologies to diverse audiences in a way that will allow them to actually make decisions uh and a lot of that is getting people away from the idea that you have to understand what mining is or exactly what a gas limit is before you can go out there and actually develop some ideas of how to use this stuff people seem to love the lowlevel explanation they always get pulled down into the low level explanation but actually we don't do that for the majority of our technology if you're thinking something like the lamp stack you know everybody uses the lamp stack or the mean stack nobody ever really worries about SQL query optimization Theory and that's kind of where we are with the explanations of these things which are very oriented around mining or even proof of stake everybody wants to get to this super low level understanding what's happening in a way that they don't for the technologies that they' already used to They Don't Really Care uh prior to this I was the release coordinator for ethereum so I basically project managed the launch of the software and that involved an awful lot of time worrying about those kind of lowlevel details but not nearly as much time as the programmer spent worrying about them so with that as pref face um I want to basically talk a little about the singularity and then I want to talk a little about why I don't think it's happening could you raise your hands if you've heard of The Singularity okay about half of you so the singularity is an American concept that took root in Silicon Valley maybe 10 years ago and the singularity basically suggests that you're going to get to artificial intelligence the first artificial intelligence will be used to design the next artificial intelligence and pretty soon you'll have super intelligent artificial general intelligences which could do everything that a human can do but better and which exist delocalized across the internet in a way which is very reminiscent of the blockchain and at that point humans will basically be Obsolete and we should make way for our new robot overw now for me the singularity was a very unreal concept until about 6 months ago when suddenly London caught up with the singularity there were a couple of pieces of big news uh the Deep learning stuff where you kept seeing these we dog

[3:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo&t=180s) lizards come out of this you see this Google's Deep Mind thing all these we dog lizards so that stuff the uh stuff where you took a painting and then a photograph and then redid the painting in the style of the photograph uh sorry and redid the photograph in the style of the painting that stuff was amazing uh and then the victory of computers over the Go game this very old Chinese board game which had been one of the high water marks for artificial intelligence oh my God if we ever crack go we'll almost be there and most of the people I know that were close Watchers of AI found that that had happened 10 to 15 years before they would have predicted it had happened it was a generational jump within a few years so that Confluence of forces put the singularity back on the table for me in a very real way and I had to sit down and really have a think about whether or not I thought the singularity was happening whether or not I thought it was important and I sat down and had a think and I came to the conclusion that I don't think I give a mon cas and let me explain why I think the artificial intelligence is probably coming I think it will be Niche intelligence long before it's general intelligence but Niche intelligence I mean things like it knows how to pack boxes or it knows how to identify molecules using mass spectrometer general intelligence is you can give it a an entirely new problem domain and it will figure out a way forward okay so let's try and teach you ancient Greek you don't know any ancient Greek figure out how to learn it machines that can figure out how to learn are basically the core of general intelligence um my belief and I'm waiting to be proved wrong on this but I think I think we can give it a try is that artificial general intelligence past about an IQ of50 to 180 will turn out to be just as bunkers as people are at those kind of IQs we all know very intelligent people have a terrible tendency to prove to themselves something is true which is obviously not true but they're so skillful at manipulating the evidence and marshalling ARG arguments that they convince themselves and then they convince other people and pretty soon you get a UFO cult or Ancient Aliens or neoconservatives um so this sort of model the the more intelligent people are the greater the tendency is to for them to self-c convince themselves of false positives is why I don't think we're going to see artificial super intelligence I think you might get attempt at artificial and super intelligence and I think that their tendency to be just completely insan say

[5:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo&t=330s) will greatly limit their utility in the real world you might wind up with a few special instances where people are attempting this kind of stuff but I think in general we're going to discover that AI is a poor substitute for systems that evolved over a billion years to trade off very skillfully the balance point between intelligence and craziness um however what you could get is very very very fast intelligence that was relatively limited and the prospect that you could wind up with with extremely intelligent machines that do your job 100,000 times faster than you do and much cheaper is very realistic particular or few people that are pushing paper for living so the reason I wanted to frame that is a lot of times we talk about this blockchain stuff as if it is going to single-handedly be the end of civilization and actually it's only one of about seven or 10 Horsemen of the Apocalypse that are all marching Over the Horizon really really really quickly and are tearing apart the very fabric of our expectations about reality far faster than even young people can cope for example uh virtual reality gear was something that you would see maybe once or twice a year now you see it basically every time you go to a conference and if there's any sufficiently large Gathering of nerds somebody has VR kit in their backpack and they'll get it out if you even mention the term right so by the time all this gear is launched from Facebook and from Samsung and from Sony and from everybody else when it's on the market you could buy it in they're launching games and it's being reviewed in the magazines and you can buy it in Dixons and all the rest of that stuff at that point VR is going to be something that you'll see four or five times a day there'll be people sitting wearing VR headsets on the bus on the way to work there'll be people sitting down in corners of McDonald's plugging into theend Matrix to see exactly what's happening right you'll go home and your kids won't remember your name right and you know I I talk about Christmas 2016 as being the last Christmas anybody will see their children because they're all going to get VR gear for Christmas and then the next Christmas you're not going to be able to get them back out of the Matrix to talk to you and if you think it's hard taking them off Facebook imagine what it's going to be like pulling them backward out of Lord of the Rings excuse me we're about to get rid of the One Ring you can't take me out it's really important so the artificial intelligence the virtual reality the drones the robots um you know what else is moving in this direction the the nanotech the

[8:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo&t=480s) biotech the life extension stuff which gets into the biology which I'm not going to really touch on just not it's there um all of these things are basically pushing us outside of what has been the traditional understanding of technology which was technology was stuff that you could see and feel and touch it was machines it was gadgets and what's happening is that we're beginning to break out of the model where technology was gadgets and into this new world in which technology basic basically constitutes an environment and that shift from Gadget Centric to environmental we've talked about this in terms of things like internet things we've talked about it in terms of things like ambient Computing uh sensor networks it's bounced around for a long time but the bottom line is that we're moving into a world in which the kind of techno world is wrapped around us continuously at all times and it's increasingly a single integrated Mass so you look at something on Amazon you put it into your shopping cart you decide you're not going to buy it quite yet the next time you go to Facebook there are 38 copies of it looking at you I don't remember putting that there right even worse you buy the thing and there are still 38 copies of it on Facebook following you around they must be wasting a trillion dollar a year advertising products that people have already just bought unless there's some sneaky reason they're doing it it's just an example of a bug in the software a bug in the Paradigm so these environmental Technologies are already wrapped around us but how much more powerful does that become when you begin to get artificial intelligence blockchains and AI smoothly operating as a seamless surface you have your goggles and you look into a virtual world and the stuff in the virtual world is directly connected to a blockchain so when you sell something to somebody or give something to somebody it really is property that has been transferred to them and not even the NSA can reverse the transaction the thing is sold there are you know no Rules by which the game masters of the game can reach into your pockets and unpick them the stuff is gone and if that is then you know integrated into your mobile phones and your thermostats and your everything else you know your house whites flash when your Castle is under attack in virtual reality and you go over there and sure enough you know you check your blockchain inspector and half of your stuff is already gone now you have a problem you phone up your friends they all leave the party they're at to get online so that they can go and Chase down the Orcs that have stolen all your virtual property in your imaginary game you know this kind of sounds like comedy

[10:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo&t=630s) but I guarantee you that you're going to be reading the scary news about this kind of stuff in the red top newspapers within six months or a year certainly next year or the year afterwards I think the narrative that the blockchain is a singular breakthrough is going to be replac by a much more General understanding that the entire world is changing really really quickly in some totally unexpected ways um smart contracts I think are going to be a huge part of that transformation process um could show hands for everybody that's comfortable with a smart contract okay so I'm going to spend a wee bit of time explaining smart contracts I don't want to talk for too long but you know try and try and get with some of the detail in place so when I take a little detour and teach you all how to explain blockchains to people that don't understand blockchains would that be useful if you can remember how to you know how this explanation works it will make everything that you're doing a ton easier so start in the 1970s and we will get to Smart contracts by the way but this is the easiest way of getting to Smart contracts start in the 1970s one computer per organization the computer is a big fragile machine in a big clean room and people wear white coats and funny little hair nets because if a stray hair gets into the tape drives the tape drives are an inch thick and like 600 M long and if the tape gets Tangled Up in a hair it can rip your customer data to Pieces so the machines are treated with extraordinary AR care because they're incredibly fragile and that applies both to the hardware and the software um there are stories about machines that crashed and it would take three or four days for a team to you know they would fly out they'd sit with the machine they'd spend three or four days reconstructing what it happened line by line by line by line before they could even get the Mainframe to reboot again these things were very very delicate they get the same kind of care that we would give you know delicate scientific equipment particle accelerators these things were you know warp course very delicate so there's a kind of prehistory where these machines were programmed by hand and if you wanted to do a query that matched data on two tapes to each other you'd have to run the tapes manually okay Advance 11 in read record Advanced 16 in read record are these two records the same yes or no if no Advan 11 in get next record check record and you know you write these little programs in cobal that would process the data and it was incredibly expensive and difficult to

[13:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo&t=780s) get anything done with computers but it was still thousands of times easier and cheaper than doing it with paper this is the prehistory 1970 something a guy called cob cod cod IBM comes up with a thing called the relational model SQL and SQL takes these tape drives and that entire model of the database and its tables and all the rest of that stuff and says underlying this there is a multi-dimensional algebra each table is one access of an enormous Cube 12 table database 12-dimensional hypercube inside of that 12-dimensional hypercube we can then close off Dimensions one at a time until we're left with two Dimensions using a simple algebra and that two-dimensional Locus that we have defined is the table that will be returned to us as the result of our query so you start with 11 12 Dimensions you say where name equals Smith takes away a dimension where City equals London takes away a dimension where purchase order equals customer ID takes away a dimension and you take away the dimensions and you collapse from this 12-dimensional space with infinite data down to three dimensions two Dimensions give me those two Dimensions as a table and this is essentially what SQL does so it tamed this enormously complex you know set of software and Hardware interactions that you had to Wade through to get simple things done with your data into an algebra that once you got over the hump of realizing that you were basically cancelling off Dimensions until you got down to the data you were looking for was something that ordinary programmers could do pretty easily and the result of that is 20 years later by the 1990s you had a handful of really big software companies like Oracle and sbase that all had their own SQL implementations there were hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in the world that could make SQL do more or less anything you wanted it to do and that generation of Machinery had been completely tamed and it's worth thinking about that because you know how domestic and mundane is the SQL database today does anybody even think about the multi-dimensional algebra inside of the thing or is it all completely invisible and lost and you just think why is my join returning enormous amounts of stuff right your join is returning enormous amounts of stuff because it's iterating over a nine-dimensional space and it turns out that the volume of nine-dimensional spaces is extremely large this might be a little technical

[15:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo&t=930s) so '70s model hardware and software are in sync by the mid 1980s we get the ibmc the ibmc gives us one computer per person or one computer per desk rather than one computer per institution and one computer per desk the personal computer Revolution again completely lost the history sure under the age of about 45 you have no real awareness that one computer per person was a radical concept you just take one computer per person as completely for granted if you're under about 35 you think of that one computer per person as being a laptop the idea that the only computer that a person could own would be a desktop and you couldn't use your computer except at home seems completely mysterious right think about to the age before Wi-Fi before WiFi it's only about 15 years right the point where you had to plug the computers in before there was any network it's only about 15 years so so Along Comes This PC Revolution 1986 1984 one computer per person the computers per person model then gets into this question of well this isn't very useful because the data I want is on your computer or your computer or your computer so to return that data to me where I want to use it typically if you're in the same office I go over with a floppy disc you put the data on the floppy disc I take my copy to my computer and then I work on it but then your computer and my computer are out of s because your copy of the data doesn't have the update on it so I then have to give it back across to you and synchronize it with you but in the meantime Bob has come and taken a copy and is working on it on his computer and none of the software in those days was capable of taking four or five copies of the same file and merging all the changes from all those copies into a single unified status even today that's still a hard problem you know git for example is all about that so that problem continues to be a really core problem for about 10 years from about 1990 to about 2000 the synchronization problem only gets worse because we do eventually Network the computers together first with ethernet and local area networks then with the internet the web then provides a super userfriendly experience for working on the internet remember the internet is around for a good decade before the web comes along ftping post scrip files so you could look at people's documents do those words even still have meaning ftping post script files right

[18:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo&t=1080s) file transfer protocols you would connect to a machine and it would show you a directory listing like the one you would get on your machine and then you would download a file in an archaic language called postcript which was a series of equations which would describe letter shapes or curves that would make an image and it would all be rendered either at your screen resolution or for a laser printer and postcript I'm you're still using postcript yeah I mean it's inside of it's inside of um for example PDF is very strong inspired by postcript and PDF is the standard render inside of apples all of these technologies have prehistories so we don't solve the synchronization problem with many copies of the same file going around until we get to the kind of golden age of client server golden age of client server comes around two or three different times the Golden Age recurs and recurs and recurs one giant computer maintained by somebody else as a service you never have to worry about it many users connecting to the Giant computer so that you can run all your jobs and so on and the giant computer keeps everything synchronized it used to be the Oracle Mainframe and people would connect with green screens then it became Google Docs and all the other equivalent Services even things like Facebook are essentially client server terminal models where you have a single perfect computer that somebody else is responsible for maintaining and you connect to it to do your Computing that Paradigm always results in the users getting screwed right because so much power is concentrated in the center by the people that own those technologies that it's extremely difficult for the users with their little green screens to get any real leverage on the system Facebook is very large your laptop and your web browser are very small so to reprise 1970s big databases 1990s WE Network the computers together initially we do all of our work by message passing but message passing results in a synchronization problem we then solve the synchronization problem in the same way that the synchronization problem has always been solved client server architecture which is the Golden Age of Google Facebook and all the rest of these things the client server Paradigm Never Dies it is simply the centralization of power but you also get centralization of services somebody who responsible for making sure your data survives along then comes the great revolution in the form of Bitcoin because Bitcoin comes along at the real apex of the client server Paradigm for

[20:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo&t=1230s) doing Computing and says actually we got something new right we're no longer swinging between you know the network and the database we're no longer swinging between peer-to-peer and client server we can have something which has the static shared picture of reality that you get from the best client server systems so not the Anarchy of message passing but something that does not create a powerful Center which will then extract $100,000 a year as a use fee from your company and that squaring of the circle is really something fundamentally new an

[21:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo&t=1265s) academic computer science level nobody had ever managed to figure out how to get a computer system to behave in such a way that you got the best of client server and you got the best of this peer-to-peer stuff as a synchronized hole um and the Bitcoin mining process which is at the heart of that is an enormously ugly hack right mining is the the worst way of doing this stuff apart from all the others has a lot in common with democracy it's horrendously expensive it's messy it's complicated people continually attempt to hijack it and you have to trust the system to sort itself out again but nonetheless it continues to provide an approximation of good governance to the point where you can put many many many many billions of dollars into those systems and they hold together so this establishes a new paradigm for how computers can work together and that new Paradigm initially is used to build on one hand what sounds very impressive a Central Bank of the internet and on the other hand something which is incredibly mundane which is addition and subtraction and these are the only two operations that Bitcoin really supports there isn't even a multiply so we go to all of this work to generate this enormously complicated peer-to-peer architecture the blockchain with all its synchronization all the rest of that but all you get out of Bitcoin is addition and subtraction ethereum comes along you take this addition and subtraction model you pull a programming language layer directly into the blockchain you have to rebuild the blockchain on a new technology and do that unfortunately but once you've done that what you get is programmability in a paradigm which is neither anarchic message passing nor centralized monolithic p uh client server and that Paradigm I predict is going to turn out to be the dominant Computing Paradigm of the next 20 years in the same that the database was the dominant Paradigm of the 1970s and 1980s and the network was the dominant Paradigm of the 1990s and the 2010s the teens and the decade following the teens are going to be all about this Paradigm of computing where everything is connected to everything else and it's continually synchronized in discrete units of time the discrete units of time by the way are not going to go away there's a minimum block time which is necessary because of the speed of light to be able to keep everything synchronized you have to have the messages go around the world basically twice and around the world basically twice takes something like 1.4 seconds

[23:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo&t=1415s) so in all probability you're going to wind up with a minimum block time of about 2 seconds might be more of like three could be as long as five ethereum is currently running at 15 but the block is there because the speed of light is actually relatively slow compared to how quickly your computer is able to operate because your computer operates by racing light backwards and forwards over a 6 of a cmet surface you know 6 millim of racing and as the light races backwards and forwards over your processor that's only 6 millim wide it can cover an enormous amount of computation compared to having to go 5,000 Mi to LA and back so the quantization of time into these blocks is a necessary step for fighting against the speed of light and as a result I think the block is going to stay as an institution and this is going to become even more pressing when we start doing things like wanting to build computer systems that manage resources which are on the moon or space stations or Mars where the speed of light delay becomes even longer and even more complicated how thinking has to be done about how to manage block synchronization now that is a very long explanation of what the blockchain is but if you pull out the Salient points 1970s are databases 1990s are networks we unify the network in the database so that you don't get the Anarchy of message passing or the centralization of power from client server and then we make it programmable by putting a programming language into that system you're up to date in two sentences and you can drill down into that explanation as far as anybody needs you to to be able to get a full set of facts for people if you want

[25:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo&t=1513s) them so going forward from where we are right now in kind of State of the Union mode um I think that what we're going to get is an enormous expansion of how much contact ordinary people have with Technologies which are beyond their comprehension and the need to be be able to take these Technologies figure out what is essentially true about them and then communicate that to people in a way that will allow them to make Intelligent Decisions about how the technology affects their life is going to be enormously key to whether these Technologies are hated and feared or whether they're acknowledged respected and eventually uh given a bit of grudging affection I don't think anybody is going to love these Technologies in any kind of mass scale because I think that we're getting to the point where our human limits are being thrown in our face increasingly by technology and there's no way until we break into a completely new way of thinking about our relationships with machines that these dialogues are going to be easy at a cultural level you know socially we haven't really recovered from the um for example the invention of Television which is a huge distorting FAL in our culture uh relationships between men and women have still not settled down after the inventure of birth control it takes us a long time to culturally adapt to a new technology so we're at a point where you know VR a and all the other horsemen of the apocalypse are coming right over the horizon they're impacting our human culture and our ability to narrate and story tell what those Technologies mean to people not just in a sales way but in a political or a sociopolitical dialogue way is the core of our ability to generate a kind of soot technical Malo a a discussion about the the role of tech in society that will enable us to come to good decisions so many of the governments in the world are currently putting a ton of effort and energy into looking at what blockchains can do for them and what most of them have done is they've looked at the blockchain as it was when they had first contact with it when it was doing a few transactions a second and if you wanted it to go faster you needed a permission system when it had no ability to scale no ability to encrypt it had no homomorphic features it was a relatively limited technology and they've built a world model based on that technology and now when you talk to government about blockchain what you hear is a whole bunch of discussion about the state-ofthe-art as it was shortly after ethereum was launched

[27:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo&t=1663s) which is generally speaking when people first started talking to them about it if you talk to finance people inside of government they heard about it two years before that at the uh peak of the initial noise around Bitcoin and for them they're still struggling with the idea that the blockchain is something other than and Bitcoin it's just a transactional medium right that doesn't affect us at all that doesn't help government so once people lock into their head what a technology is they get very fixed around that idea and it doesn't leave them much room for understanding that the next time they see that technology it will wear a different face and the next time they see it after that it will wear a different face and the next time you see it after that it will wear a different face right and it's not that all of these faces are basically the same face over and over again again like Doctor Who where it's the same set of capabilities with new graphic design it's that you actually get an entirely new generation of capabilities and the jumps are not unfamiliar to us right phone used to mean an electromechanical box connected to a cable by a wall uh sorry connected to a wall by a cable with you know something like 48 volts running down it to operate the ringer and the microphone that used to mean phone then phone became something like a little nuia with a bunch of buttons on it and it was Wireless but it didn't have any web access then phone meant something with a little screen that you know you could just about browse a WAP site on then phone became something with all those features and a camera and a video recorder and an MP3 player and then it became you know phone and if you pick up somebody's modern phone you know iPhone 6 Samsung S7 something along those kind of lines what you have is a very very functional laptop that they left the keyboard off running an extremely sophisticated operating system that's actually much more user friendly than your desktop in most cases and we still refer to this as phone similarly with blockchain to government or warge companies blockchain is the first version they saw of it they're still back wondering you know is it a dial tone hands up if you haven't actually ever heard a telephone dial tone right it's a it's a thing which has become part of the past the static that you see at the beginning of HBO shows you know that was cosmic ray is interacting with electric wire Loops called antenna right you see it on YouTube as well the actual original mechanism which

[30:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo&t=1813s) gave rise to that static is long gone you know why do you have a 3D print out of the save icon that's actually a floppy disc what's a floppy disc so one of the things that we have to to start teaching people when we introduce them to a new technology is we have to introduce them to the idea that they're getting on a ride which is going very steeply up a curve so this is this thing called the blockchain today it looks like this tomorrow it will look a little different the day after that it will look different again and 5 to 10 years from now we expect it to be kind of sort of something like this and introducing people the idea that what you're showing them is a Little Seedling in a pot for a tree that will be 100 met tall with roots that go down 35 ft you know that sort of thinking is quite difficult for us to do because what we're introducing people to is not objects we're introducing them to processes this is the blockchain process it's an evolutionary system that will produce a bunch of different Technologies one after another and that evolutionary system is self-funding to the tune of several billion dollars it has hundreds of activists that have made enough money from that process to to be able to work on anything they like for the next 3 to 5 years some of them for the rest of their lives and that soot technical system will continue to generate enormously sophisticated artifacts each one building on top of the one before it until we're at a point where there's nothing immediately visible that you want to add so we know that at point x where X might be 5 to 10 years in the future we will have a blockchain system that works at 5 10 15 50% of the speed of all the computers in the network put together so if you have 100,000 computers it will be 50,000 times faster than the fastest computer in the network maybe it will probably be programmable in a bunch of different languages and a bunch of different paradigms it will probably host limited artificial intelligences and it will probably be interwoven with almost any device that you could imagine it being interwoven with and that blockchain some people occasionally refer to as Sky Net is completely inevitable as soon as you have the blockchain that we have today plus enough money for people to continue to build it because every step towards that technology is profitable to take and there is no regulatory framework which can stop people creating those

[32:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo&t=1963s) Technologies and I don't mean this in a kind of fist waving fight the stay old Bitcoin libertarian way I simply mean that we don't have any regulatory framework as a society for globally rejecting a technology because we don't like its implications the last time we managed that was uh cfc's to protect the ozone layer and that was a very very rare like once in a century moment of cohesive action from Global government on things like carbon emissions we've done nothing on genetic engineering of you know organisms that we release into the environment we have no real structural planning so the fact that it's almost certain that we will wind up with a blockchain which looks like that tells us nothing about the paths that we could take to get there we know that it will be an awful lot of Right In code we probably know the names and faces of many of the people that will be at the core of that process but who is to say whether the people that begin the race will be the ones that finish it there may be several generations of technologists and new ideas in there or it may be built directly on top of the ethereum platform and proceed as a linear set of breakthroughs from Vitalik could go either way uh personally I think my money is still on Vitalik because he's amazing but you know it's open to discussion it's open to doubt it's open to people bringing their code as we begin to talk about the blockchain as evolutionary steps towards this kind of integrated Global Computing surface right we could go back to the story about how to explain it one computer per organization one computer per person many computers per person which is where we're at now finally one computer per world all the one computer per person stuff becomes woven together the cloud gives us a metric for many computers per person being moven into a cohesive hole we go beyond the cloud into this blockchain and this blockchain takes all the stuff that was done for your Computing in the cloud and connect it into a single massive Global Enterprise and that single Global massive Enterprise looks almost exactly like the internet but now you can make payments on it and if you give somebody a copy of a picture only they get to see that picture so for Ordinary People it may be that by the time we've built this essentially perfect Global computer computer network all that they see is that the Internet payment stuff is secure the credit card stuff is no longer continually getting broken their passwords don't get hacked and life goes on with a series of little sequential improvements but underneath that we take a 50 60y old architecture for connecting

[35:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo&t=2113s) computers together and we pull it out from the existing internet and we replace it with a fully you know cryptographic distributed architecture Without Really breaking the user services that go on top and this is BAS basically much the same process as we did with the phone we took the phone we got rid of the wire but to get rid of the wire we had to pull the entire old phone network to pieces and we had to replace it with the mobile network to get from there to the phone as a kind of web browsery thing we had to pull out the entire operating system and processors from the old phones and we had to reshell that around these little mobile supercomputers that we now call telephones so there are several examples of the things that you touch every single day of your life that have gone through this process of taking an existing interface Paradigm and an existing story pulled out the technology put the new technology underneath it without the user really seeing a blip and this is my fundamental kind of State of the Union prediction for what's going to happen with the blockchain I think the blockchain story is going to seamlessly fuse into the web and the internet as we get things like the brave brave browser which is a browser with a Bitcoin wallet built in and ad blocking and that was done by the guy that invented JavaScript so the notion that you'll simply see web browsers grow crypto features and crypto browsers grow web features and the whole thing kind of fuses together around something like ipfs you know some bank will issue a stablecoin on the dollar that's tied to your account you can use it the credit card and you know your payments stop making you feel exposed because you know where the money is going you know wh listed addresses inside of some private blockchain Network Maybe and what you will see is that the fuss around the blockchain as a separate technology will gradually go away as it simply begins to reinhabit all of the Internet of Things devices all of the web browsers all of the bank transaction processing and most of the cases where you need any kind of secure computation which could well be things like onetime uh key logins or um uh two Factor authentication and once you realize that all of those Technologies are running on the same deep interconnected infrastructure platform called the blockchain or whatever we wind up calling it it becomes apparent that we've gone through an enormous civilizational upgrade of our Computing infrastructure but without having to break all the existing paradigms so I think and I feel a little

[37:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaNJ01T0BQo&t=2263s) exposed saying this I mean I feel like I'm going out on a limb but I think that the blockchain hype about blockchain is a separate technology will not live out the rest of this year I think instead

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/280-2.md (part 2 of 2).
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