# Singapore talk (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [295], 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, 2015-07-16 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s. 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 explainer.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The Ethereum Launch Process (2015): Ethereum Foundation blog post, written as the new release coordinator, setting out the launch in stages:...
  - The Future We Deserve: "Facebook for the Five Billion?" (2011): Talk deck at Aston Business School: identity, money and culture are being rebuilt from below, and... (suggested by machine)
  - Taking a crack at a practical system (introducing the ESCROWNYM) (2012): Blog essay proposing the escrownym: an identity lodged with escrow brokers under a legally binding... (suggested by machine)
  - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (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)
- Topics: Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (27%); Ethereum — launch, release process & programmable blockchains (10%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: proof of work (7 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); KYC (6 here; 27 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); proof of stake (4 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); digital signatures (3 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); shared database (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); internet money (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); contracts (8 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); legal status (1 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); accounts (2 here; 51 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); Ian Grigg (1 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2015)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): Ethereum team; internet money
- Importance: core-text score 0.26 (1.00 is the top), number 301 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [565] [Coin Telegraph AMA with Mattereum's Vinay Gupta 14th... (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/565.md): same career work: The Ethereum Launch Process
  - [113] [The Ethereum Launch Process | Ethereum Foundation Blog (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/113.md): same career work: The Ethereum Launch Process
- On the same works, just before: [301] [Ilaria R. and Vinay Gupta discuss the Ethereum Project... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/301.md); [775] [Vinay Gupta - Foreign Policy By Internet Protocol (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/775.md); [299] [Mic audio: Coase's Blockchain: can equity crowdfunding... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/299.md)
- On the same works, just after: [225] [Imogen Heap: saviour of the music industry? | Imogen... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/225.md); [755] [Vinay Gupta | Computers that just work | State of the... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/755.md); [757] [Vinay Gupta | Interview | State of the Net 2015 (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/757.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: Singapore talk, video, 2015-07-16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [295], https://guptaoption.com/texts/295.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=0s) Could you um could you keep an eye on that and let me know if it stops recording can do should be fine I'll also tell you for battery that would be great I do have do two things I do okay so I'll just do a bit of introduction good evening everyone welcome back to thebi seminar Series so today we have our V here talking about about the developments of ethereum and Beyond so we had a series of you know talks on bitcoin and blockchain and the big issue that has been coming up recently is how do we use blockchain how do we use the blockchain technology like governments banks have been telling us they want to experiment with it so ethereum is one of the reading uh people behind uh looking at blockchain technology so so today we have u v here with us he is the releasee coordinator for and he's in Singapore talking to Regulators as well right and um discussing blockchain technology and so without um I think we're running a bit late so without further Ado that's welome so um let me get a sense of who's in the room uh how how many of you actually uh know how to program an ethereum contract okay how many of you could stand up and give a kind of rough description of how ethereum works okay how many of you want to develop a serious project on ethereum whether academic or uh commercial okay so should I start at the very beginning and we can talk about what ethereum is and then we can go from there that' be a good way doing this okay what about Bitcoin knowledge how many of you have a pretty good grasp of Bitcoin yeah half of you something like that how many of you program computers uh for money few business finance that kind of stuff okay um

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=150s) come in come on we haven't we haven't started yet right okay we'll just have to use the audio off the camera so um

[3:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=188s) okay so um let me start beginning with why all of this stuff matters right does anybody have a simple clear comprehensive definition of what money is yes tell me what money is money is a medium to exchange Services between people okay uh is it the is everything as a medium of ser to exchange services money no mean we can segregate the definition with the storage of value but value itself derives from the fact that human people want to exchange services between each other okay so does that sound like it defines all instances of money or does it only Define most instances is it is it is everything that anybody will ever call Money included in that definition or are there other definitions that might be used for different things it's your so my my experience with this is that all definitions of money tend to reflect the culture and the cultural understanding of the person doing the defining so there is a standard kind of Economics perspective on money that it's you know medium Exchange store value and a few other things but when you actually look around all of those functions exist in other places and in the past there's been lots of contention about whether specific things were or weren't money so for a long time we agreed that gold was money now people will say the gold is commodity and gold only becomes money when you stamp the face of a king on it to stop people using other forms of gold all of this kind of stuff de basing of currency people used to think that the gold was what gave the currency value then they started putting other stuff into the gold the currencies of can be based okay well maybe money is what K says it is then we pull the metals out the circulation entirely and we get the kind of American dollar which is now backed largely by gaswork and Vapor so the definition of money I think is socially constructed and we continue to redefine money in whatever way seems useful to us on the day that we happen to be doing the defining I think this is really important to understand a fundamental level because once we Adit that as Society changes the definition of money tends to change with it we're prepared to deal with the 21st century which is shaping up to be one of the weirdest

[5:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=338s) centuries in human history like it's going to be as weird as when we discovered agriculture or discovered fire right you know people are legitimately speculating about what human lifespan will be at the beginning of the 22nd century in centuries and I think it's very hard given that in 1900 American life expectancy was 45 and in 2000 American life expectancy was 90 to suggest that life expectancy is going to remain static for the next Century so we're dealing with a position where we can reasonably expect an enormous extension of human life within our lifespans and uh all kinds of enormous shifts in our technological base computer power multiplying by a million every 20 years all of these processes running simultaneously the idea that you can take you know Bits of Paper or in this case plastic right backed by the promise of nation state to be a fundamental final form of money doesn't make any sense at all I mean we used that stuff for a long time and you know now we have these things and you know these things can interface onto State money they can interface onto Bitcoin they can interface onto D anything somehow this is just an interface device to computer systems that use that as an end point so what I want to start by talking about this is by getting a clear understanding that money is whatever people use and call money trying to get a fundamental definition of money which is true across all cultures at all times is like trying to get a fundamental definition of love which is true in all cultures at all times it really does depend once we accept that we've got this kind of uncontrolled rampant technological acceleration and we've got constant Chang in the way that uh the state and citizens relate to each other and the way that the citizens relate to uh each other as well never mind the relationships between states it becomes easier to say what money has been than to say what money will be do we really believe that there will be paper currency in 50 years if not if it's not going to be paper currency in 50 years where does paper currency stop working in an age when you've got recovery of gold from seawater or asteroid mining or any of this kind of stuff going on uh what does that tell us about the ability of gold to hold value because if you decide that you're going to go do asteroid mining on larer scale gold very

[8:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=488s) rapidly becomes a non scarce thing what do we do if gold becomes as common as aluminium you guys know by the way there was a period in which aluminum was vastly more expensive than gold didn't last very long but you know relative values of all the assets continue to fluctuate depending on the technological base and the social base so how is it exactly we're going to keep some kind of fundamental clarity about what value is it can only be socially constructed and if it's socially constructed in an age where life lifespan is reasonably expected to double and you've got this massive discontinuity in the technological base with all the acceleration that goes with it it seems fairly obvious that money is going to change in a fundamental way and if it doesn't it will be the only thing in the environment that isn't changing due to what's shaping up to be a century of amazing changes so this is where i' kind of like to begin the thinking to say that fundamentally given that everything is changing a lot of it is changing in an accelerating way why would we expect cash to say static once we accept that as a kind of

[9:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=553s) starting point then we can look at Bitcoin in a proper historical context we invent the internet we move books onto the internet we invent the internet we move music onto the internet you get Amazon you get the Kindle you get iTunes um at some point somebody say let's move money onto the internet first attempt is a thing called eold has anybody ever heard of eold ah eold good old things right uh Eagle was where I got my intro into all this stuff I put about 1% of the transaction value through the eag system in 99 uh and her frankly never recovered so eold was a very simple system started by a d dentist drct en in Florida called Doug Jackson and Jackson was a goldbug he had an Excel spreadsheet at home and if you mailed him gold coins he'd have them to the your spreadsheet and if you called him again and said give the value of my gold coins to one of my mates he would just move a couple of rows around and they now own your gold and if you asked him to send you your gold he'd send you your coins back then they might be different coins you know you might sent him 10 1 oz coins and You' send you back to 10 oz bar but value in the system was preserved minus some transaction free a dug to and you can kind of see how this works right it's an account based system that runs on gold your account is demarcated in grams everything's L by the time they got whacked by the US government for banking without a license they had $80 million of gold reserves millions of customers uh you could move $100,000 worth of value from one side of the world to the other using a cell phone and it would cost you 50 cents and it was efficient for micro payments down to a third of a penny they users in just about every country in the world and I seem to remember at the time their total sort of transactional volume through the system was equal the GDP of Tania because the money moved extremely fast so you know by any reasonable standard that was an extremely successful payment system and in an environment with slightly more technical support and a better regulatory environment there's no doubt at all the eagles would be the first wave of real internet money it was International everybody agreed on the value it was compatible with Islamic finance a pretty substantial degree I mean it really was a universal money system the only problem was they started it in a country that was really all about the dollar and wasn't going to let anybody do any of this gold so a few years pass and the decentralization Revolution begins in

[11:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=703s) Bitcoin I think there's a pretty good chance that Bitcoin was funded by Veterans of the eagle system there are a whole bunch of little kind of footprints on a lot of the stuff written by satosi that sort of indicate that he was the very least extremely familiar with e gold H even if he was not 100% a member of the cour team but my guess is he was some very close inside of that community so once you agree that

[12:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=730s) centralized systems that attempt to operate outside of the state are inherently fragile you get around to this idea of bantine consensus right we're going to spread the system out all world and as long as most of the system agrees on what the status is of the system then we have consensus system and if you and I both agree that my bank balance is 50 Quid and your bank balance is 35 these things become facts if everybody involved agrees on what something is that thing is now true the problem is that you can't have a consensus system which is based on physical assets so if you're in the gold economy you can have Auditors that will physically turn up look at your pile of gold and Vault verify that the bars what they ought way please uh and there's no problem at all with doing that it's how the entire gold economy works right once you step outside of gold as an economic unit the question then is if we've got lots of people with computers all over the world cooperating and try and make something that looks like a currency how do you verify what the value is even if everybody agrees on the rules of the game how do we make sure that we all agree on where the pieces are on the board and to get there the satosi community I don't think that was an individual but that group of people whoever they were basically produce a thing which is more or less a summary of everything that we know about cryptography up to about 2004 so it's got hash cash it's got um you know uh chained uh what do you call them chained hashes uh it's got digital signatures it's got a whole bunch of complicated Game Theory stuff in it's this enormous almost like a lexicon of stuff in computer science wedged end to end to end to end to end to end to end into this rough H Arch that we call Bitcoin and the Miracle of Bitcoin is that all of these crazy pieces of computer science when you stack them up just about right form a structure which is stable enough to have supported uh market value market cap4 bit billion dollars which for a bunch of software to have become $4.5 billion dollar uh not based on the likelihood that it would earn more money in future like a doom but based on the inherent value of the tokens that it had generated is truly remarkable right I mean it's not selling an experience like Warcraft it's not

[14:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=880s) tracking currency for an underlying asset it's a thing whose actual use value to the community that owned it was at $4.5 billion not so long ago and send you Bitcoin prices right now by the way it was kind of a run the last time I checked over 300 now over 300 now see that's quite good isn't it I'm quite pleased to hear that people blame gree well I mean if Bitcoin goes up every time there's trouble in the world it's sure sign that it's current it's become like gold it's got some Reserve so Bitcoin is a fabulous thing as time begins to pass people begin to want to do more and more complicated interesting stuff with Bitcoin this is

[15:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=926s) where the problems begin to bite Us in the right so the worst problem with Bitcoin is that Bitcoin is just a currency and it turns out that to get really interesting stuff to happen in the world just the currency is not enough you need things like auctions you need things like Futures contracts you need derivatives uh you need regular contract you all kinds of other things and Bitcoin doesn't provide the facilities for building those kinds of other things so what happens with Bitcoin is you get these very secure payments that get connected directly to only kind of sort of secure shopping carts so the payments once they're made are final they're Anonymous kinda and all the rest of that stuff but the shopping cart that is taking those payments is as hackable as any websites so you can have all your Bitcoin stuff nicely set up and then somebody cracks your web server Nicks your secret keys and then Nicks all money and all the way through the Bitcoin economy there been raid after raid after raid after ra where people have lost millions or tens of millions of dollars because the systems around Bitcoin are fundamentally less secure than the Bitcoin is so what's happening is that your attackers basically go you know they're not going to go through the front door they're going to step around to the side and come through the back and that approach is extremely difficult to defeat as long as your system has a border right and if the system has a border then the border is going to be something which is weaker than strong cryptography because everything is we strong cryptography and your adaptors just come in from the back bam so part of the motivation behind ethereum is to try and build a closed system in which everything is as secure as the strong cryptography so if you need to run programs to actually execute trades or to run shopping carts or to run auctions or to be Futures and derivatives and all the rest of that then the programs have to run in an environment which is Contin with the underlying payment layer you can't have a fault line where one thing turns into another thing an attacker slip a blade between the two prior open you need to be a continuous surface with no joints which means you have to take the software and you have to put it directly into the same mechanism that stores the value and this is ethereum ethereum is a blockchain so it's a distributed database much like Bitcoin is but it's a blockchain that stores software and the software has the

[17:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=1076s) AB ility to make decisions on behalf of its users and those decisions can execute a wide variety of financial operations and other things now that jump of storing software in blockchain rather than just transactions was incredibly radical when the jump it was this AA moment and everybody who looked at that said obviously the right idea follow that matter and here we are right 50 of us

[18:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=1102s) plus all of our uh donors put money into the system to enable us to build the we are now close to lach right very close like close enough that I almost made the mistake of giving you what I think is the current date so it's really quite close H the issue list has gotten down to very very small numbers uh you know it's basically all B Bar the IR this point so what's going to happen when we launch ethereum for the first month or two is probably not very much the hope is that we will stand the system out lots of people our bet end software right now on the test networks will load their stuff up onto the network they'll begin to offer some services and we will slowly slowly slowly slowly make sure that everything's behaving exactly the way we think all behave so the hope is that it will be a slow soft lach in actual practice there's a decent chance that it will be all over the newspaper CNN will go wow this is amazing enormous numbers of people will Pile in and then exchange infrastructure will collapse or our technical support lines will be overwhelmed and it will turn into exactly the kind of mess that you expect when the entire world piles through a doorway this one so we're hoping for a soft launch uh if it turns out to be a hard launch I'm fairly sure that the software will stand up because the software is very strong uh the rest of theor around the software may have issues right because it takes time to build human organizations but ethereum will scale to pretty much whatever size people decide that they're going to build or PO with it um shortly after that probably another month after that we'll have the actual launch which will be I think called Homestead and that's the virs ethereum that we recommend that people actually go out and tell your customers ready to do business get over here and you know start training um

[20:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=1211s) now I want to talk a little bit about how you get that ether so I've mentioned that the blockchain is running software but what this actually looks like is a program running on your computer with no user interface at all and if you want to talk to it you have to bring up a command line interface and you type commands to inol things JavaScript this is a fundamentally nerd oriented product it has no relevance at all to the vast majority of potential users the way that you talk to ethereum is through websites and the strongest most secure way of doing that is to have a thing called node running on your computer with ethereum on one side in a web browser on the other you download applications and run them in that environment but that AR M again opens up these little security CHS because if somebody hacks your laptop they could get in between these components talking to each other and cause trou so the next step on the path of ethereum is a thing uh that we call metropolis and Metropolis is a web browser which contains all of the ethereum backend stuff internally so that you have a single integrated application which provides all the nice user interface and display website features at the same time is having a secure engine inside of it which manages your interface in the blockchain so at the point where we get to Metropolis what you'll be left with is a secure execution environment for code which talks to a globally distributed shared database which gives you the ability to access things which look exactly like websites but are impossible to censor or shut down and are connected to kind of Internet of value so you could trade with people on the other side of the world using those interfaces that is going to be kind of a big de uh I expect that we're going to see Metropolis next year uh I think you'll see some decent Alphas of metropolis late this year but I think the actual L version is probably going to be into next year um Metropolis is very much what we envision ethereum to be from the beginning but with any project is complex you have to ship in slices if you put everything together into a single package and then try and drop that initially in all probability there will be some unforeseen problem and it will fail you have to build the complex complexity incrementally otherwise the systems simp become overwhelmed uh after Metropolis there is

[22:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=1352s) ambition to produce a thing by the name of Serenity and serenity is a fundamental break in where we've been and where we're going so up until now all these systems have been secured by proof of work and proof of work is essentially uh we've done such an enormous amount of computation in layers so that you can't modify the layer underneath without changing everything that comes after that anybody that wants to undo all of that and fake history has to do more compute than it has been done in the entire uh Bitcoin Sy dat and that's why we understood to be intractable given that the hash rate the speed of the Bitcoin network is something like 500 times the speed of the top 100 super computer it's an astonishingly fast Network because it's got warehouses warehouses warehouses and cunningly designed custom Hardware grinding in the mostly in China at this point so the problem with proof of workers an approach is it just generates an enormous amount of expense which drains value out of the network all the time because you have to pay for the electricity what you really want is to keep all that value in the network rather than feeding it to electricity companies to warm the atmosphere with and to do that you need to move to a different algorithm which we call proof of stake so proof of work operates by me proving that I have done the right thing by burning all of this electricity proof of stake on the other hand has you pledge some of the contents in your bank account that you will do the right thing so essentially what happens is that a a piece of computation or a contract comes to you you run the contract you write down what the output of the contract is and then you bet the bank account that that's the right answer and then you put it back into the system and if you're honest everybody else will agree with you and at that point you going at nickel and you all uh you know have got more reward for your labor if on the other hand you're a fraudster you take the contract you write down that the result of the contract is the opposite of what it should be and then you put it back into the pile and because it is different for all the others you then lose your deposit and that sort of an approach is almost like a sort of shareholder democracy you have a situation which all of the people with accounts make what essentially interest payments only accounts because they're constantly doing the work of evaluating other

[25:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=1502s) people's contracts and because there's a consensus about what is true we agree that that contract had this output and everybody that agreed with that is rewarded this is kind of like what they call a shelling point so that process produces a system in which everybody that has money will receive small payments for using that money to ensure that the system is running inest way it gets away from the computational radiators it gets away from the associated warming and it should increase the speed of the systems remarkably it's also building walk on the path to a thing called blockchain scaling uh which is even more exciting so does anybody know roughly how fast

[25:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=1541s) the Bitcoin Network goes in terms of transactions per second seven or somewhere 12 those kind of numbers right it's it's really not very fast does anybody own a Computing device which is so slow that it only does seven transactions a second I mean I had a zx81 in about 1981 I am pretty sure that if I gave it transactions to do it could manage a few hundred a second pretty sure certainly a few dozen a set so we're dealing with a system which although it's extremely secure is slower than the slowest microcomputers that you were ever able to buy from the whole and this is slightly ridiculous like something is cly wrong here that's happening because this is a very very very early product Bitcoin is like the first computers that have tape drives it's the first hard drive it's a really really really simple system albeit very complicated when it first created it's pretty easy to see that it's just a brick and a wall so what proof of um sorry what blockchain scaling hopes to do is to create a transactional network which instead of only getting more secure when you add more computers to it actually gets faster so certain notional you find a way of dividing the network up into zones each Zone runs sort of independently for a while so they're all running in parallel and then you unify all the results from all the zones into a single consistent version of history and if that sounds a bit fiddly it's because it's a bit fiddle right blockchain scaling is a proper hard computer science question uh I sometimes wonder exactly how they're going to make that work I've got some background in parallel Computing and blockchain scaling is d that's a really hard problem um but I think there's smart guys I think they're going to pull it off and at that point what blockchain scaling buys you is uh blockchain technology that competes with things like uh Amazon web services or Google's comput Google's app engine in the market for large scale fast computation boy that sounds interesting doesn't it to go from you know this extremely slow system that just crunches Financial transactions in a few years to a computer where every time you add more computers to it it gets even faster you know that begins to sound like you might be able to challenge things like Visa in say four or five years because if you

[28:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=1691s) have 20 million people leaving their laptops on all night running ethereum um you know you start do the back of the envelope and that's say $1,000 a laptop so 20 million 200 million 2 billion 20 billion well that's 20 billion worth of computers wow and you you begin to think can Google afford to spend 20 billion a year on computers probably not is it probably not so you might get this situation in which all of us together have a shared Computing resource which is vastly more powerful than any single entity in the world and if we can figure that out it might be that we can generate a sort of secure free internet that nobody else is large enough to overturn and if we get there what we've successfully implement this kind of communications democracy and I think that we all agree that that would be a very good goal point so today currency right in a month or so contract and if we keep it together we might manage to get a secure free internet for everybody um I think I will leave it

[29:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=1753s) there take some questions and maybe if people want more deps on something going talk for another five minutes in a while about anything that's left okay questions question right where does the program actually run ah right so everywhere all the nodes run the program age on what the output the program was and then write back to the uh CH read what is exactly the contract ah okay so smart contract is a terrible term H it's an old term and it's an accurate term but it's still a terrible term what I mean by contract is function it's a function that's stored on the blockchain it's got access to some variables because it's in the blockchain and you know put it there in a few other pieces and when the function executes it can write stuff back the it's just a function yeah actually as doing that that's I fig it is when I compared to Java programming and I found it is a similar like a class where I store my behavior of the class but the what why I need to store the behavior of the like contract and need to decrypt and store in the ethereum what is the purpose that because we are usually uh we say ethereum when you talk about that it is a like a blockchain database where you want to be centralized whole information or transaction details then why instead of keeping the transaction why we need to store my program logic or my uh business logic in the ethereum okay so the question is why do we need to store the program logic in the blockchain so the answer is uh to do something like a futur contract um you know if you and I agree that you know the price of the dollar is greater than the price of the Euro I'll be 50 Quid right um when you and I agree that we write that agreement into the blockchain so that's what makes it a contract what makes it a contract is that everybody can see we've written that into the blockchain and on the day that contract is evaluated if it's valuated in my favor the money is automatically moved to me so as soon as we've made the agreement and push it into the blockchain that's it it's a done deal come in guys we cont no we're still talking function right so we take a function and we upload it into blockchain reflects the agreement we

[31:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=1903s) have because it's in the blockchain it can't be disputed later on and it automatically executes in the blockchain to move the value from one okay and how are that this kind of logic keeps changing with the time usually so would then um when you need a new contract you upload a new contract I mean it's it's a very very simple instrument you know it's it's not a you know the system is not fundamentally sophisticated right now the contracts are small objects you put them in the blockchain they run they move value around job's good you know it's it's not it's not the same classes things like ltp systems inside of Visa it's not like kind of intelligence that runs inside of Google they're basically just small chunks of code that make simple decisions and move value around and they could be more complicated than that but not yet so another question yes oh sorry a good question I see that you you are hesitating between proof of work and proof of stake yes and I'm wondering why you don't uh consider that um protocols like report based on consensus could solve the problem also in a very efficent way without the problems inherent to proof of state and proof of work um the problem as I understand it with ripple is the the number of people forming the consensus is limited right so in a ripple system you've got a set of people that are like jewy and they decide what's happening we really don't want that we want something which gets more and more and more users who all have equal rights inside of the system so we don't want there to be a special set of people to make decisions about what's true we want that job to be fully de so no web of trust that no web of trust the web of trust is every you know because otherwise you've got a system which has a center and those centers will either exploit the inter or they will be exploited by other people make somebody over here yeah well let's put an example for example title to the house right so I'm selling the house yes and I need to move that title will that function as the as as as as the as as the smart contract yes so questions about titles the house in theory there's no reason you couldn't move physical assets based on a smart contract so the

[34:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=2053s) way that you might do that and I'm going to wave my arms a little here so you know I am not a lawyer but the way you might do that is you would basically form a company which had a SLE asset which was the house and and then the company would state that the beneficiary owner of the house would always be the person who was referred to in a particular smart contract on a particular blockchain so from the perspective of the legal system the house is owned by a company from the perspective of the blockchain the house is being transferred from one person signs it open another person with cryptographic key and the joint between the two is the fact that you RI judge to be able to look at the contracts that manage the house and I mean legal paper contracts the manage the house and agree that the reference to the blockchain is valid because until you have court systems that are blockchain aware there's always going to be this problem of you walk into court with you know a cryptographic key and a bunch of PR out and the judge says yeah right right so actually making sure that your property rights on a blockchain apply to anything in the real world is a job for some very cunning lawyering and a bunch of pressent uh good luck to the people who are under taking this bold work I I wish you for the best let me know you need any help I've been thinking about this for a while Ian Grigg and ricardio contract is your search term for that I you love to hear from anybody who wants technical help on implementing those does that make sense yeah it's s thinking like in peer-to peer oh in peerto peer peerto peer stuff it's fine but property ownership in our cultures is not defined by peerto peer precedents property ownership and cultures is defined by law and as a result at the mercy of lawmakers and uh judges and police because if they don't understand the agreement between two people they can always invalidate it and simply assign the property where they think it belong so as soon as you start loading physical property into smart contracts and moving it around you're really taking your chances because there's always the possibility that we have no idea what that is it still belongs the B see you exchange a bunch of digital signatures for a hammer and you think that he should give you the hammer and you're going to sue him for the hmer could you explain what digital signatures again I'm not veryy good at math you're J jurisdictional hazards on the implementation as SM contracts for physical property are a big deal this is probably why blockchain stuff will largely remain digital goods from the I uh

[36:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=2203s) question sure I don't want to monopolize the questions no no please um perhaps you heard about mit's Enigma project uh I saw the headlines go by hug to the paper so that's distributed computing as well like that um so I'm just wondering how is ethereum going to compete in a market that keeps moving before lach so this is a really hard question the thing about blockchains is they're intended to be kind of permanent stores of the past and permanent store of anything means that it doesn't change very quickly if it does it changes the way that preserves everything that's gone before on the other hand the technical environment moves very very quickly um before I came to work for ethereum I spent ton of time talking about how the likely um the biggest threat to bitcoin was not Regulators but its successors and then having moved onto the uh the ethereum team it's pretty obvious that if ethereum works it's not going to be the last step in crypto stuff in the history of History right people look at Ethereum and go you know that's pretty clever but there are a couple of things that they really really really should want have done and they'll come along and they'll build another system on top of it so I think that we're in a position where we're going to see continually evolution in these systems until somebody hits something which has the same kind of durability as vaa has and maybe that's something will turn out to be ethereum but I would be very overconfident if I suggested that I was sure of that there's a lot of way see I was just wondering you mention that in five years ethereum has proven to be that system that works what are the antitrust implications for this if you're talking about Metropolis is like a web browser that the only safe web browser to be used then obviously this has severe policy and antitrust implications because you all the other ones are behind you be banned well from from ethereum well I mean they would be technically in compartible Ro that's the same thing right well okay so let's think about what the legal status of Ethereum would be in that kind of situation um as a piece of Open Source software it doesn't have a single own um it's very likely that in that kind of scenario we would have a bunch of different companies that were all producing ethereum compatible procs so the same way that all these you know web browsers run you know HTML 5 you would have you know ethereum 1.4 and

[39:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rH2PWTHB_s&t=2353s) you'd have a bunch of different technologies that were all compatible with that set of protocols um I think that would probably satisfy Regulators uh because ethereum is very much defined as a protocol product we've got three implementations uh one in Python one in C++ and one in go and uh we do that very specifically to make sure that we're developing a protocol by which things talk to each other rather than a product which could have only a single implementation and then when you try and build a second implementation you discover that it's full bugs but the bugs are invisible because it's only um it's a good question I mean it's yeah how do you become a standard what that has to do with legal structure it has to en can you imagine how that would have sound at 10 years ago you mean the computer wants me to en my fingers yeah that's interesting question okay uh I think any other questions yeah take two three more questions then one more just taking clue from your example here I ethereum has just come so maybe in few years time another similar system or better system will come up right so in this say 5 years few million customers on board they store the smart contract they withal assets mhm and then there's one more come and then one more comes Y is there any common Foundation regulatory standard right is overseeing all the system so that there there is an agreement of exchange of value across these because people like to move across right so questions we moving across from one standard to another right now we move stuff between Bitcoin and ethereum using exchanges so theoretically remember ethereum is a live that but theoretically there will be individuals who out of the goodness of their heart will take your Bitcoin and sell okay out the goodness of they 5% but whatever happens that becomes a lot more complicated when you start having volum contract right because either every smart contract platform has to be back compatible with all the previous platforms and you need a protocol by which a smart contract shuts down on one platform moves across to another platform and then reopens or you wind up

---
Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/295-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [295] Singapore talk, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.