# Beyond flags and nations - blockchains and global democracy (ok audio) > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [293]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: video, 2016-04-24 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGnwTTg2ACI. Text: automatic captions, uncorrected - 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): Global-tier governance ideas. - 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: Open government & anti-corruption (25%); culture / history / fiction (17%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: global democracy (3 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); global governance (2 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); accounts (3 here; 51 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); human rights (2 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); scams (1 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); science fiction (1 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); citizens (1 here; 63 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated) - The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): scams - Importance: core-text score 0.27 (1.00 is the top), number 292 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 0.94) - [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: [769] [Vinay Gupta talk, Amsterdam 21/10/2015 (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/769.md); [694] [EB114 – Vinay Gupta: From Lawyer Capitalism To... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/694.md); [776] [Vinay Gupta presents "Nuclear Poker" to the London... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/776.md) - On the same works, just after: [292] [Beyond flags and nations - blockchains and the world -... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/292.md); [291] Interview with Sam Warburton of RWE about blockchains,... (2016); [287] [test edit (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/287.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: Beyond flags and nations - blockchains and global democracy (ok audio), video, 2016-04-24, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGnwTTg2ACI; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [293], https://guptaoption.com/texts/293.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGnwTTg2ACI&t=0s) okay ladies and gentlemen so um welcome to uh day one um there's it's talking three and the make a talk Series so can we please uh put our hands together uh for the inner Tool uh benedicta [Applause] for you to start with which is how many worlds are there one one it's a good answer uh seven and a half billion one per person lots of different ways you can see it um how many flags are there one per country right why is it in front of the world why do we not have anything that represents the entire Earth which is commonly used there are lots of flags for different countries they're also flags for different organizations which you know represent the whole world in fury like the UN but there are actually no Flags in common use that represent the world as a whole or the represent humanities and this is because we don't really have any global politics we've got enormous numbers but we're not really that anything you can send the business of global Solutions and if you've got a situation where you've got lots of global problems that nobody is in the business of global Solutions you're going to have a problem and the problem that we have is very little effective action at the global level and Global problems because if you look even for a hard flight for it how is it going to be politically effective we're in a situation where all of the entities represented by Flags right after the viewer head are defending the thing that they're flat represents that there is no overall social technical political movement the Hubble the world's problems for the world safe or the world's problems with future Shake it's all extremely tightly challenged does this kind of make sense as a position to start with so I want to talk about this thing that everybody's heard of called Bitcoin or the blockchain or ethereum this new set of technology and I want to talk about what it looks like to provide a system which is capable of governing the world's resources without necessarily being controlled by Any Given country or any given individual or even set individuals what does it look like when [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGnwTTg2ACI&t=150s) you can begin to manage the world's problems using Technologies which are not truly global um is there any possibility there that we could finally get some effective action on the world's problems outside of the framework created by the amazing Flags so this is partly economic geography partly it's political economy partly in science fiction but somewhere in the middle of that I want you just keep in mind where's the world flag why does nobody stand for the world as a whole and if they did what would they do so way back over in the 1970s we invent a thing called the SQL database and this is just the database an Insight more or less any computer system that used today there'll be a thing that stores data in tables and the tables look like spreadsheets and the so-called s2l system links a bunch of spreadsheets together here's all of our invoices here's all of our customers here's all of our orders here's all of our payments here's all of our inventory and I kind of weave these things together in a way that allows you to run a business and this technology is quite new compared to things like rail you know we've had a complex industrial civilization without computers right up until the mid-1950s when we started to have computers we ever heard by mid 1960s and databases didn't become a thing in the 1970s and from about the 1970s through to maybe the early 1990s all the big companies really did was to whatever information they had on paper and gradually converted those business processes until they were safely inside of the computer and everything would now work smoothly and automatically and companies lost a lot of flexibility as they land because there wasn't so much of a making a note in the corner of The Ledger saying that this stuff has to be delivered on Thursday so there was a lot more rigid performance oriented stuff became the foundation of what became quality and control and there was a move towards much more rigid kind of mechanistic society 1990s come along and you get the networking explosion suddenly there are computers everywhere and they're all linked together but they'll link together the way that works for people email it to chat on its documents and none of that stuff fits cleanly inside of the older rigid mechanistic SQL format because documents are entirely made of all notes in the margins they're [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGnwTTg2ACI&t=300s) fluid they're complex they're often deeply interactive because you've got many versions of the thing and it never really fitted properly in the database so there's always been a bit of a split both culturally and technically between these systems which were 70s vintage and very mechanistic and rigid and these 90s vintage systems which were the web and were very fluid the networks have never really worked smoothly with the databases but all the institutions will databases and most culture lives on Networks and in that Gap there's an enormous perspective and we've had this problem for a long time not much has changed so finally we come a little further and we get to the present five years ago 10 years ago so verified people came up with this thing called Bitcoin and Bitcoin basically took this network of stuff this database stuff and found a way of joining it together so you've got a new kind of software where everywhere that you have a network you have the database and everywhere you have the database of networking there were seamlessly fused together and this system run very smoothly it was like a punched card speed system but slowly before we got to use it and they couldn't do anything complicated it was essentially a pocket calculator it could add and subtract it and actually multiply but it was enough you could do currency because all they can really have a bank account there's a number and the number goes up or down according to rules and everybody in the world has to agree what number in your bank account is if you're going to be able to make a payment because if people in North America think for balance is 100 and people in South America think your balance is 95 they're going to disagree about whether you could make a payment for 97. so this notion that you need a global consensus to handle Finance turned into Finance running on top of this software that connects all the computers involved together into a global consensus and that Global consensus only handle bank accounts and they weren't even bank accounts in real money at least it wasn't seen as real money initially it was anything called Bitcoin and Bitcoin was basically a Global Currency backed by the software that allowed you to see what everybody's accountants were and that had a global consensus or the balance of the accounts and it started running it started running and started running in school we declines acquired value because you could make a payment with the stuff [7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGnwTTg2ACI&t=450s) there were clear rules about how it was created there were career rules on how to spend and because it was very transparent and very International uh at the peak the total value of all the Bitcoin in the world if you convert it into Dollars would have been about 10 billion dollars which is pretty good for a piece of software that doesn't even have a clear original offer it's not movable original system um from that has come a slow transformation of political Consciousness among the technical sort of programmer types that work on these systems which is if you build a Central Bank of the internet out of nothing more than a bunch of software and a bunch of connected machines what else could you do because we've got lots and lots and lots of really big hairy Global problems and we can't seem to get a harmful and the kind of fairness and transparency issues around International Electronics manufacturing waste disposal that a previous speaker discussed for example but there's a clear example where if you had a transparent system where you could see the components as they were manufactured put into the system you can see them being synthesized into an object you can see the object being shipped ball sold on page four you could watch every single step of the increase in prices of things to the system you could see it become garbage and then you can see it be recycled if all of those tracks in a single global system in a transparent Fair way you can imagine that it would make it vastly easier if it managed all the problems once you've got visibility credible accountability of the rest of these kind of things you could actually get a handle one more time in a way that allows you to sort of seize hold of the problem get a clear amount of it and then do something same thing could be done for clothing if you could have a favorable system that tracks all the people that are in any carbon dioxide maybe we can figure out a way of regulating those people or charge them fair prices or if they will be regulated or charged properly maybe we could just have a buy-in from them boycott in a way that would allow us to slowly steer the global economy away from the remaining oils and core problems and towards some kind of green Elders in the future you'd actually do the same thing but biodiversity the goal lots of information satellites backed up by lots of information from people you know trumping through the jungles in the forests itself it was [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGnwTTg2ACI&t=600s) documented what they've seen well for example look what it requires is Global Systems of governance because what we've seen so far is that the nation states exist in an anarchy and it's alternifiable demography there is no really effective international law in most of the key areas the governments when they don't like what's happening ours says if they have enough power simply say we're not doing that and the conversation ends there because they're Sovereign and there is nothing that stands above the nation's state to make rules there is a United Nations that the United Nations is essentially a guilt of nation states and it has a very hard time doing anything which is against the interests of any of its member states it's a very very small bureaucratic difficult institution better than nothing but it also provides representation for the 200 floods not for the seven and a half million individuals that stand behind those flags and in this world if you never offend anybody you never get anything done that the United Nations is not very good at offending people particularly nation states or large corporations so if we are to get agending the effective system of global governance we need to be able to agree on what the files are and we need to be able to agree with the rules are science gives us a reasonably good way of getting older objective factors it's by nobody it's perfect but it's the best instrument we have it can be politicized it can be distorted by fathers in some cases legal but in general there's a fairly good consensus about most of the measurable phenomena if you want an observation generally speaking scientists are getting one uh interpretation of Love is a very different question but if you just want to find if it can be measured we can measure it out on the other hand and figuring out what is acceptable to the world is a much harder question because although we talk about democracy as a democracy is an unbridled good thing nobody's talking seriously about a global democracy if one person one thought it was a good idea one person one for one world is probably a better idea for the things that affect all human beings shouldn't there be voting for everybody you could imagine for example in a world where nearly everything is a cell phone it would become possible to hold a global election and you might not hold Google lecture until like the president of the world I [12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGnwTTg2ACI&t=750s) think we've seen quite enough attempts at that kind of thinking to conclude it's probably a bad idea but nonetheless you could do Global opinion pooling that would give us a really accurate picture of what the world considers to be a good idea of bottom again and the nature of opinion Falls is that you don't necessarily have to ask every single person in the world every question to get a statistically reasonable answer about what the world as a whole fix so if you're in a position where you're doing a global opinion rule if 90 of the world are against something you could figure that out with a sample of maybe 100 million people the closer it is to 50 50 the larger the sound you need but oftentimes you don't need to know whether it's 5149 or 49 51. simply knowing that the world is deeply divided to know the issue is enough so you don't necessarily need accuracy in the cases where it's marginal the fact that it's marginal isn't itself all the data you need because we're not talking about absolute power what we're talking about is a really understanding the global public opinion another Power walks inside of global public opinion which are very large like all of them so there are religious groups which Traders have called values that are political groups or chairs have common values that are nation states which have very strong education systems that give their citizens a particular picture of the world and walk out other pictures all of those kind of blocks become very easy to survey because you know from these people's belief systems what it is that they will say in the US questions so you can make relatively sparse use of survey in the cultures where it's actually hardest opinion it becomes easy because of the regimentation of the rigidity even very light access to data will give you nothing the picture to be able to make a decision about all these people are not going to save you how do you keep those systems fair if we were going to do this kind of global survey work to understand what Global public opinion is how do you know that it's not being manipulated and you come back to our old friend the blockchain so the same underwater technology that makes up Bitcoin is going through extremely rapid Evolution and more or less every Bank in the world has a project working with these Technologies many of the governments I must have control completely half a dozen countries at various degrees of intensity about how we might be able to use these systems to run more fair and transparent government [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGnwTTg2ACI&t=900s) so we could see in only a year or two I think it is literally Europe efficiently robust tactical system that would allow you to do Global survey work to gauge Global public opinion in a way where it's very hard to contest the results of those opinions I don't think it's robust enough for internet voting in the sense of direct transfer of political authority to the person I think that we are a long way away from that and it's probably a bad idea even so but for this kind of Illusion that you could figure a global public opinion and use that as a way of encouraging governments and corporations to do a world wants rather than procedures and for them in the short run I think these systems are secure enough uh statistically significant sample as possible because what you need is blockchain on a cell phone other blockchains are pretty much Universal there are many different systems one that I work with most is called ethereum I work for a company called consensus that builds products on ethereum but I think that you can see that you know it could be one of 50 Technologies five or ten years from now so what happens in the world if the entire human race has the ability to express its opinions clearly a single Global survey where the questions can ask can answer them but I'd like to think it would happen in such a world is that we could begin a real Global Knowledge about what the world wants not what the flags the individuals want or all of us together in Creole at least in principle is necessary and many problems that affect us more deeply in the next 100 years or problems which are inherently cool and everything to do with climate is fundamentally important situation and I think that it's like we were going to do okay in terms of getting rid of the last remaining carbon it is solar balancing wouldn't have become associated with so abundant uh something like 50 or 60 of the installed energy in America last year with green energy used the fracking bubbles so as we come out with that we get a short break maybe 10 or 15 years and then the next round of really unmountable technological change comes around the curve in the form of non-technology biotechnology or artificial intelligence and a few other things all of those are moral issues because [17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGnwTTg2ACI&t=1050s) they affect everything if you genetically engineer some new kind of problems with proactive query that is salt water it's something to stay in one country the stuff will spread everything people will smuggle seeds on their work and Export weekly or illegally this stuff will grow all over the world um in those kind of situations we as a global Society can probably ought to be making decisions about whether we're comfortable with the risks involved in these kind of experiments out of 80 of us are comfortable with those risks maybe they're making 20 just enough to drive along with their life but if it's 50 50 maybe we need much more detail the global examination issues before we just go out because if half the world since it's a bad idea and there's no way of I'm doing it afterwards maybe you should wait until people are ready maybe you should give up so inside of these kind of positions what would it be like to be able to get up in the water and instead of looking at the news which has been filtered 51 different ways and it's often a very distorted mirror of reality because everybody thinks their own country is the center of the world and every case of their people are the most important people if you could actually see the stand what the world thinks about core issues that day we could actually begin to survey the entire movable field in a way that was directly representative of people even if it was by statistical samples of the biops and the notion that we can build a global democracy around your Global dialogue about our fundamental values and about our deep reactions looks to be to be the convergence of social media blockchains and democracy that you know the notion that democracy is only the movement where you go to a ballot with an excellent piece of paper and drop it in is a model that we've gotten to over hundreds of years of debate income practice but actually that was so far behind our technology a lot because if we were to update with technology it's entirely possible that we could get a democracy that is much more conversational and much more well-rounded and in the long run the ballot processes at the end of the democratic process at the beginning there's a whole process of opinion formation dialogue fighting with positions understanding the problems that happens before we get to the final stage of voting voting so maybe we need to start the global public opinion formation process where we begin to see how the other half [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGnwTTg2ACI&t=1200s) of things have slowly begin to cook here on some common values maybe 20 years before we get around the entire Resort so that's my notion that I think that we are now in a position where the critical Technologies required for Global democracy are here other questions then only do we have the political order there we go okay here we go if anyone's got any questions then um we can go a few minutes to fill them now and I'll try my way across as best as I can to you with the microphone Matthew up last week okay that's fine one question um do you see any barriers to this new technology so there are water barriers to use in blockchains in the financial services industry if there's anything that involves uh money or stocks shares Equity selling securities to the public anything like that is heavily regulated uh largely because when it was unregulated say in the 1920s there were enormous number of really damaging scams people are taking for a ride that actually done for individuals on the economies of all however if you're not using these Technologies tightly inside of financial services they're unrestricted nobody reminds what you do with this stuff it's only when you're using the inside of those kind of areas and the other problem I think is it would be kind of shocked if we knew how the rest of the world saw things so when you begin to understand that you know Europe had 500 years of intellectual upheaval and a lot of associated violence before we got to this thing we would call modernity or post-modernity before we go into the kind of moral law we have and when you go to cultures I haven't gone through that into actual upheaval and their perspective is often very hard to understand so I think that we would be shocked by how much the world is still a very Traditional Values um what those Traditional Values are um however this is a very delicate balance because a lot of what came along with this modernization of thinking in the West Was colonialism and imperialism and those things are very much European driven phenomena and this is in the last Millennium other cultures did that stuff but they did it for a fundamentally [22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGnwTTg2ACI&t=1350s) different understanding things that divide right the Kings so I think that we would have a real educational struggle to begin to understand how the world really sees itself and see each other and the thought might be much harder to deal with the regulators um and there's other ones that are trying to put out there as well I mean it's going to take so long to decide on which one who is the actually makes a decision and holding that teeth so if you're working on something like serving you don't necessarily have to have a single system as always have to be Publishers you know a list of basically how many people were asked and where they were asked and how they were asked you could have half a dozen systems running as simultaneously and the results would probably be pretty easy to compare with each other because you have the evidence from which the statistical calculations have opinions have been done um so it's not what we necessarily have to set on a single technology and then walk everything to that technology anything that has this kind of global Reliable Property would be good enough computer technology to run the statistics itself last question so given everything you're saying I think it's going to happen I think we're going to get there if my diet required but it's going to happen because of the resources on what I'm concerned about is violence and violence against populations that are in locations that might not necessarily have ability to control the outcome of kind of online alcoholic behaviors right so if you think about women when you think about their position globally infectionally very tenuous and what would happen if you could see okay you know 65 or 70 or 80 percent of the women you know the world didn't think that women should have some of the rights they have like how would you begin to address that and what were those structures yes so this is possibly the hardest problem in the world um you know I kind of was glossing this in the earlier question but now that it's right on the table and one of the things that we have to decide is whether modern cultures have a right to impose their values at a point of the sword on traditional cultures um we've had several centuries in which [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGnwTTg2ACI&t=1500s) exported volumes of the West to other cultures deployed the sword right I mean you know the notion that you went with the Bible on a McDonald's you know thought to war to the very ends of the Earth and the question then is are we willing to which a civil war over human rights and if so put yourself unicorns so for example the Saudis are in control of the one of the UN Human Rights powers and a lot of people think this is absurd because there's still executing people are very much daily basis but then sort of The Americans the problem is if we have a global representation we're gonna have to deal with global public opinion a lot of the food's really really bad to very small educated liberal leads in Western countries so we're faced with a choice of humanitarian imperialism or get a programmable democracy and I think that within the educated quite liberal Elites we haven't really come to terms of the fact that the vast majority of the world simply disagree with us and we have to then decide whether we're going to impose these values other people even though they disagree with us or whether we're going to give people self-determination and accept that a lot from her beliefs that we got rid of hundreds of years ago um you know inside of the space that we're in where is the room for that debate I don't think anybody who's really talk about it but if we're going to have Global representation we have to be able to make peace with the father of what people disagree with us about things that we consider to be Universal problems and then the question is are we to be the ones that we need if they choose not to follow and they go some other way are we going to force them to be even with the capability to force them but what we don't have is any kind of deep sophisticated political discourse about that issue right you know it's such a delicate area and it's only just coming over the horizon we don't you know groups of people with settled opinions on it it's kind of a political Lush we don't know the analysis so my hope would be that over time as this stuff comes over the horizon we can get our political Scholars out of kind of 200 years of debate about Left Right internal politics in terms of European countries and we can begin to build the vibrant political Distortion about the global governance and globalism and local economics hard questions big questions I enjoy it [27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGnwTTg2ACI&t=1650s) um please give another massive amount of Applause for them --- End of [293] Beyond flags and nations - blockchains and global democracy (ok audio). Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [292](https://guptaoption.com/texts/292.md) Beyond flags and nations - blockchains and the world -... (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.