# Daniel Pinchbeck and Vinay Gupta discuss using blockchains for coordinating environmental protection

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [284]. 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, 2016-05-31 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkYGU4qi6sM. 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): Argues ending poverty is cheap and a coordination problem.
- 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 (18%); culture / history / fiction (18%); Climate politics & democracy (18%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Transition Towns (2 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); political will (3 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); Frontier (4 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); money creation (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); distributed manufacturing (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Fuller (2 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); cheap solar (1 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2011, 1 undated); basic income (1 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); political change (1 here; 25 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Buckminster Fuller (1 here; 29 sources in all, earliest dated 2006)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): money creation
- Importance: core-text score 0.28 (1.00 is the top), number 278 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [747] [Startup Societies Podcast - Episode 34 - Vinay Gupta (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/747.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
  - [572] [How To Address Climate Change: Diplomacy, Politics,... (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/572.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
- On the same works, just before: [288] [test (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/288.md); [290] [test (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/290.md); [286] [Ouishare on global democracy and the real sharing economy (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/286.md)
- On the same works, just after: [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)

## 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: Daniel Pinchbeck and Vinay Gupta discuss using blockchains for coordinating environmental protection, video, 2016-05-31, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkYGU4qi6sM; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [284], https://guptaoption.com/texts/284.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkYGU4qi6sM&t=0s) uh hey there this is Daniel pinchbeck uh I'm an author what breaking open the head in 2012 finishing a new book called we have soon as now which is looking at the eological crisis as a sort of collective initiation right of passage for Humanity uh vene and I met in Paris we've been having ongoing intriguing discussions about many topics uh today we don't have that much time to cover a lot of them but hopefully we'll get another chance to talk longer soon and of all the Myriad of things that we've been discussing from the occult to the quotidian what is it that you were most excited about typing into it for a minute well so the thing that you would be talking about was um Collective action problems right this idea that you could get an awful lot of people organized to work together for some kind of Greater ecological purpose and that doing this would be you know fundamentally worthwhile so yeah well we have a big issue right now because we are aware that there are many things we need to be doing individually and collectively that we're just not doing uh and that you know we're looking at a catastrophic scenario of E ological Downfall with CO2 Rising we know that's going to lead to 2° C temperature above pre-industrial levels which will start to trigger the methane under the Arctic which is already beginning to come out uh you know plus a loss of 10% or more biodiversity every 10 to 15 years uh and everybody you know is aware that this is happening and and I think in their hearts people would love to do something but because of the individuality the the the the sort of profit structure all these different aspects of our of our civilization people feel that their owns are meaningless and pointless you could become a vegetarian you could stop you know eating pork you know you could you know give up a car but if everybody else is not doing that then what's the value sure you know so then my thinking was we now have these incredibly profound Social Network Technologies that allow people to you know see each other communicate with each other theoretically they could be used to coordinate Collective actions so for instance people could make a social contract you could go to a site you could be be like hey like you know once a million people all say they're not going to eat meat anymore or at least for a year or two you know or maybe once every two months for a year you know I I'll I'll join that movement you know and and and I'll do it in such a way that uh yeah and then so once a million people have signed on or 10 million people then it's like the contract's launched and everyone is you know you know then you could even have local groups forming you know like support groups locally kind of like AA you know the technology could could facilitate that really easily kind of like

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkYGU4qi6sM&t=150s) transition towns on steroids like transition towns or or right just just you know you could have a way that people could then make it fun you know so it actually be like an adventure that you know if we remember like what happened during the Blitz in London and these other kinds of events like actually people often remember them as great times to be alive because they had a sense of collective purpose purp which people don't have right now internal and

[2:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkYGU4qi6sM&t=171s) the problem is that the the the enemy which is the global eological Mega crisis is too big uh for people to to deal with individual did you see this thing that like a third of the Great Barrier Reef has just been announced as dead yeah I mean I'm aware coral reefs are are in huge trouble which also is another very bad sign because they they they they you know sort of are the home for a lot of the oceans biodiversity so I mean inside of this context right with all this going on um you know the flip side of it is that we have this huge American libertarian thing pushing very hard for a weakening of the power of the state and a lot of the initial thinking around things like Bitcoin came from that kind of movement right there were people that wanted non-state Solutions but I've yet to see any realistic proposal from the Libertarians about how you enforce climate regulation right you have to find some way of capping the amount of carbon we produce it doesn't matter what your political framework is you must do that so I think that kind of the Bitcoin era of blockchains didn't really give much of a toolkit for making those kind of changes there wasn't really a clear mechanism by which you could get the lid on the carbon process in a way that would give you some breathing room um but the position that we're in now is very different right you have this ethereum blockchain it gives you the ability to do massive Collective action like the da is about five or 6,000 people who've raised $160 million to do Collective investment in what amount to uh you know new technology projects and the idea that you could in a few years do something which was way bigger than that locked all of these pieces together you know in a way that gave you a coherent approach you know every body says they're going to buy solar panels once you reach $100 million you buy 100 million bucks worth of solar panels everybody installs them you put in the energy monitoring gear it's the only way we're going to make our way out of this crisis is we need we're not going to have time for linear incremental Solutions it's going to have to be an you know exponential Solutions where where you know Mass groups of people make decisions together and I don't think I we had this discussion before whether that could be done through Ben you know kind of a benevolent autoc you know autocracy or benevolent Monarch or something um I'm not even sure we have time for that I I think using you know look 10 years ago Facebook didn't exist now one billion people are talking every day 1. and I actually organized uh helped organize an event last spring around climate change at Facebook headquarters in Pao Alto wow and you know but they weren't and one idea we had is like you know um just put on the top of every Facebook page the

[5:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkYGU4qi6sM&t=321s) fact that we're actually facing ecological Armageddon and that this is what everybody needs to know and this is what they can do about it you know we also suggested creating uh you know voting uh you know groups like you know if you have all these groups like I have a million and a half people and a group I started this Aver group but they can't do anything together million and a half people something like that but if they could all vote for things together then of course they would want to vote for you know probably boyc conting Monsanto together you know getting not using plastic bags and so on I mean so anyway so Facebook is obviously locked into the old mechanism of the corporate structure if if this blockchain technology could be used to create large scale opportunities for people to collaborate to to accelerate the types of progress that we know we need that would be awesome well me there's no doubt at all that you can do that with blockchains right the this kind of basic transformation of how things work no doubt you can do that I think you'll see

[6:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkYGU4qi6sM&t=375s) blockchain based equivalence of a lot of the tools we have now and then after that you'll see blockchain based equival uh you know blockchain Innovations which is nothing like what we have you know everybody knows we're going to do a Facebook we're going to do a Twitter we're going to do an email we're going to do a you know I PFS is essentially huge web server all of that stuff is coming along getting the collective action side of it I mean 10 years ago would have said it was impossible because there was simply nothing that people could do right I mean Collective Loft insulation vegetarian diet would have cut their emissions by a 2% 10 15 20 but overall there wasn't much of a possibility of Lifestyle transformation but now with electric cars and ultr cheap solar panels you know you could actually get pretty close to a zero carbon life in the states um while still maintaining something like a first world lifestyle you'd have to buy a bunch of carbon offsets you'd have to restructure your house you'd have to buy an electric car you'd have to charge it from your own panels but those sorts of approaches they're becoming feasible at least for people that are kind of in the 1% or close to the 1% and so I think that there's a very distinct possibility of making that work yeah well it has to go Way Beyond the 1% but maybe it has to start there well I mean everything good starts there right I mean the bottom line is that the rich have money to make mistakes they can try experiments when they screw up their lives don't get completely wrecked um but in terms of like you know but essentially like I mean personally I believe the only way that we're going to be able to respond as a species to this challenge of the ecological you know situation is through you know kind of unifying a as a planetary Collective and actually making sure that we're not just trying to make you know assuage the guilt of the 1% but but actually create scalable solutions that that bring everybody on the planet into a decent way of life potentially with a universal basic income or subsidy which is what Buckminster Fuller I see on your wall over there already foresaw in the in the 60s you know in his book Utopia and Oblivion and his in his other works yes um and you know with distributed manufacturing this is like a you know a number of thinkers have been looking this direction like Paul Mason is a book called post capitalism jery riffkin talked about it in zero margin cost Society Kevin Carson's desktop indust deskt desktop regulatory State yeah yeah yeah we could potentially you know you know use the technology we have now to create distributed and scalable solutions that would you know help everybody on Earth to reach a decent quality of life I mean we've had that

[8:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkYGU4qi6sM&t=525s) potential for a long time I mean you know it's not that expensive to fix poverty you see costed estimates it's like you know 5 billion a year 10 billion a year the numbers are not really enormous we just completely lack the political will to do it you know the voters aren't voting for it therefore the Democratic mandate doesn't extend to it well I mean I think part of the problem is is is the um you know capitalist economic Paradigm which forces corporations to uh you know squeeze profit you know turning everything into a profit Center and some of this stuff is not doable under that under that construct yeah you know so either it has to be accomplished by you know the the new tier of philanthropic capitalists who just profited so you know insanely that they can you know sort of you know do these various initiatives or it has to be through some kind of Civil Society um Awakening the Civil Society Awakening stuff I mean there's certainly been a 60s edition of that Vision which has been around since the 60s and which I think has made essentially zero Headway um I wonder whether there's the potential for a new round of that based on some somewhat more solid principles because I think there's this kind of folk Mahayana thing that was a huge part of the 60s Vision this sort of notion that you were going to see some kind of collective Awakening that was going to be spearheaded by people that were essentially playing the Boda role you know inhabiting that archetype and I don't see any evidence that that's actually made much of a dent in culture if anything it's hardened attitudes um but nonetheless culture changes over time MH you know 10% of people meet their Partners on using online dating sites things like Amazon Walmart have become essentially utilities you know they're hardly corporations anymore they don't actually make any money for their investors MH well I mean Walmart does um so it's clear that we're getting shifting paradigms after Paradigm after Paradigm it's not impossible to be that as you saw in Germany the next Paradigm might be green mhm you know the Germans have

[10:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkYGU4qi6sM&t=639s) basically gotten themselves halfway to being off grid they've got very expensive energy and all subsidizes their conversion and that came without any substantial political change other than we're going to get our environmental stuff together MH like it wasn't part of a bundled series of value shifts they took a single thing which was going to fix the engineering problem at the heart of our green problem and then they went out and did it using very very mechanistic Tax Market mechanisms mhm um so I wonder if we decouple a lot of this stuff from Consciousness transformation whether we could get the green stuff done without it because getting the green stuff done with it has proven to be extremely difficult mhm um sounds good I don't know man yeah I don't know either um I mean obviously the am 11's approach is built right on top of the Buckminster floor approach this is all Rocky Mountain Institute and they were you know like building Ultra green trucks for Walmart 10 15 years ago you know a lot of people find that disp faceful I have fundamental doubts about it but it seems like the existing alliances are breaking down and you know that we're just not getting enough Headway with the existing deal so I wonder where in the landscape and for example Derek Jensen your jenson's work so I wonder whether one of the problems is that Jensen was basically 10 years too early that there wasn't enough de desperation for people to take him seriously but I wonder whether he had the right fundamental idea that you need a hardening of attitudes you need different perspective I yeah personally I've never felt like such a huge resonance with with with his approach no most people don't I mean you know Jensen is marginal for a reason but I wonder whether um this is one of those things where adolescent tantum quality I mean yeah from from my perspective like what we see with for instance Burning Man is the potential of a new kind of um you know kind of symbiotic connection between you could talk about the ' 60s counterculture and the corporate Mega machine you know and um you know in a way like what happened with the 60s is that the the cultural values um you know the the you know ideas of you know Consciousness and freedom were kind of assimilated into the the mainstream corporations and became the style the Aesthetics of you know the system uh the window dressing in a way but um somehow the system managed to continue along its path of kind of domination and control but that also might just be a stage in a process that actually takes a while to unfold where there is sort of a deeper integration of uh you know the the

[13:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkYGU4qi6sM&t=789s) values of well let's not say equality maybe but you know personal Liberty care altruism you know um those actually now you know I mean sort of I think Buck Mr Fuller even foresaw this in 60s I mean you know it's not that hard for people to create like bioweapons like if we're destroying these populations around the world uh through passive genocide by letting climate change annihilate you know and sea levels inundate uh you know eventually people are going to get very very pissed off and um you know it's going to cause more terrorism more retaliation so it's actually a total security risk to not take care of the people of the world who all have you know who are you know many of them have the intelligence to to you know to to to to do all sorts of stuff at this point when I was a DOD I wrote a piece called winning uh winning the long piece cuz you know this was when they were still talking long War uh which wasn't directly about climate but was about you know what do you have to do to create a global population uh in which you survive weapons seems unthinkably wasteful MH you know how do you actually approach that and basically in a world where everybody is getting a reasonable deal I think that the psychological archetype that gives rise to people like Bin Laden doesn't operate yeah well

[14:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkYGU4qi6sM&t=859s) there's two things I mean there's also I think a natural and this is where I believe Consciousness is actually crucial to an alternative Paradigm that could actually sustain the future of humanity uh I mean we we we you know by our nature we have an evolutionary push you know we have to have a frontier we have to have something to push towards otherwise we just tear ourselves to pieces I mean the two things I think saved Western Civilization were basically the fact that Quantum Dev easing didn't cause inflation actually three things right Quantum deving didn't cause inflation fracking stopped the economy from collapsing and E one musk reopen the High Frontier and those three things took us from a position where I expected like Civil War in 2009 into a position where the machine managed to buy another 10 years only quantive easing didn't cause inflation is they just decided they would just keep printing money they just accelerated you know imaginary money creation which was mainly handed out to the financial institutions but it bought us enough but I think that you have to add on to I think you have to add on to Elon Musk and the frontier of space the the inner Frontier of the psycho Cosmos and the fact that we're seeing incredible discoveries right now like there was just a you know kind of um demonstration around lsd's uh you know kind of um uh research around LSD was demonstrated Royal Society in London the sort of center of the scientifical yeah they've discovered that essentially you know when you take a substance like LSD it lights up all these normally dormant areas of the brain like a Christmas tree you know there's there's a lot of research coming to to you know fruition around the potential value of psychedelics for healing but also for creativity personal self-discovery and I mean all the micro doing stuff they're doing as well you know you look at micro doing and you think that's the kind of thing that Society might eventually franchise yeah but even beyond that it's actually just as a paradigm since we've since we've you know covered the earth now with industrial technology you know there's on the one hand is the possibility of getting out into space on the other hand is the possibility of going Inward and actually kind of mastering the the the inner dimensions of the psycho Cosmos yes but I mean for what percentage of the population well something can start out as a small percentage and then you know I mean grow quickly when people are like oh like that's actually a more interesting thing to do yeah I mean you know Tim L's old Vision right was drugs and VR and it seems like about every 20 years that comes back up again so maybe this time it take yes sometimes um you know I mean that's the sort of the curse of the Visionary as you see things ahead in the future and then maybe you know it takes a while to come around I mean my perspective on this is that we've got a decent chance of building a Global

[16:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkYGU4qi6sM&t=1009s) political order right blockchains give you the ability to run a global bureaucracy that isn't located in a single big biggish building somewhere like the UN or Geneva New Yorker or Gena so the idea that you could have a kind of planetary resource management system sort of in the line of ecological economics or possibly yeah exactly possibly along the line of resource based economy but that it would have no simple political center located inside of a nation state be software that all the states can contribute that all human beings can see the workings of its transparent seems like it gives the possibility of a bureaucratic capacity that would have the ability to run a sort of planetary ecology and you know if your approach generates the political

[17:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkYGU4qi6sM&t=1051s) will for that then I think that the blockchain guys are more than capable building out the bureaucratic structure to implement the political will yeah it's getting exciting I like it well you know I mean for example right think of the the things you been talking about about vegetarianism being a simple thing that people could do to cut footprint you know undeniably beneficial on all levels I mean 30% of the earth's land surface is being used for animal grazing yeah and um some by some accounts CO2 production is you know 30 to 40% due to factory farming so you know if people you know make a decision to go vegetarian log the fact that they've go gone vegetarian on a blockchain you know wager money that they will continue to be vegetarian if their friends count through cheating they can grass them in and take their tokens you know you could actually see a kind of somewhat gamified somewhat carrot and stick conversion vegetarianism on a large scale that's exactly the idea that I had a few years ago which I haven't had anybody really be interested enough to develop with me maybe we can mess around with it it's not I mean it's not an unreasonable approach and it's kind of um what's the word I'm looking for here exactly um you know you see all this Quantified Self stuff so the idea that you could connect the Quantified Self to a Quantified world where you could take all the tracking information from your wristband and turn that into an estimate if you're actual ecological impact you know those kind of approaches when they're built I mean one one of the ideas is that on this book spontaneous Evolution and then we have to wrap this up I think yes sir and Steve bman talked about how yeah the the Paradigm of cooperation symbiosis should win out over competition and aggression I mean um you know and and and sort of hyper individualism you know cooperation should out compete uh competition yeah abs and if that's going to happen in in the levels of extreme you know kind of scenarios that we're moving towards it's going to have to happen pretty quickly best tools for coordinating that that I know so far are these blockchain things and give it another five or 10 years I think you'll see five or 10 years is a lot of time at this point but I'd love to give it two or three well I mean we can certainly prototype now you know but by the time you got a scaled blockchain something that runs hundreds of thousands times faster than what we have you finally have the kind of planetary infrastructure that it would take to do Quantified Self meets Quantified world right cool let's uh and if we did that let's get to work on that sucker you know you bring the people I'll bring the tech really good talking to you we must do more of this fabulous thanks

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End of [284] Daniel Pinchbeck and Vinay Gupta discuss using blockchains for coordinating environmental protection. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [863](https://guptaoption.com/texts/863.md) Vinay Gupta - Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin (2016); the most closely related, [747](https://guptaoption.com/texts/747.md) Startup Societies Podcast - Episode 34 - Vinay Gupta (2019); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.