# Vinay Gupta - Transparent Society - Crowdfunding on Blockchains / Ethereum (part 2 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [296], part 2 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, 2015-06-18 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gVri8wVGPc. 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): Small-stake finance for public goods.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Coase's Blockchain: Can Equity Crowdfunding Accelerate Past Venture Capital? (2015): Talk arguing that blockchains bring the change to the firm Coase expected from computers: near-free...
  - 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)
  - Half a Trillion Dollars a Year of Magic: Blockchain, AI, and the Future of the Built Environment (2026): Mattereum essay: combine AI with the blockchain into self-enforcing smart contracts and move real estate... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut...
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (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: Equity crowdfunding & venture capital (32%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: equity crowdfunding (46 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); venture capital (7 here; 26 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); political legitimacy (3 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); interoperability (3 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); transaction costs (4 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); Thatcher (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); Cyberpunk (2 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); water filter (1 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); platforms (3 here; 76 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); Coase (1 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 2 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.49 (1.00 is the top), number 91 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [299] [Mic audio: Coase's Blockchain: can equity crowdfunding... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/299.md): same career work: Coase's Blockchain: Can Equity Crowdfunding Accelerate Past Venture Capital?
  - [706] [Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin - with Vinay Gupta | Virtual... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/706.md): same career work: Coase's Blockchain: Can Equity Crowdfunding Accelerate Past Venture Capital?
- On the same works, just before: [299] [Mic audio: Coase's Blockchain: can equity crowdfunding... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/299.md); [153] [Financial Cryptography: Coase's Blockchain - the first... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/153.md); [298] [Raw footage of Transparent Society mic audio soon (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/298.md)
- On the same works, just after: [171] [Taming Black Elephants (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/171.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: Vinay Gupta - Transparent Society - Crowdfunding on Blockchains / Ethereum, video, 2015-06-18, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gVri8wVGPc; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [296], https://guptaoption.com/texts/296.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[39:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gVri8wVGPc&t=2348s) seeing right you know I'm making my living right now from technological exuberance expressed as watts of small donations to charity right it's amazing you could do things that nobody else could possibly do now oh I'm right dude Rob I have my spies with me real wealth creation results right if you're just using Bitcoin is way of taking you know bunch of payments business off a bunch of stupid bankers and giving it to a bunch of actually giving it annuity because you keep the money and you're not actually creating new wealth making an existing system more efficient reduces the drag and moves money from the pocket of one middleman to no middleman or resit in the pocket to the customers but it does not create new wealth what creates new wealth is doing deals that could not otherwise be done right you get a 12 or a 15 party deal it's impossible to use normal instruments to cut that deal you come along with some piece of new technology enables a more complex kind of multi-party corporation boom you have just achieved wealth creation so the notion that we could start creating new wealth by doing impossible deals to fund impossible projects are a huge scale because lots and lots and lots of nerds are on a hundred thousand US dollars a year and could easily burn five or 10k your equity crowdfunding stuff and if you multiply that by ten million people on tax salaries across the West you begin to realize that's a river of money that's substantially larger than most governments right oh oh right oh you know you begin to think like what is that you know 10 million people 100 million billion 10 billion 100 billion with relatively conservative assumptions you could imagine a pipe with a hundred billion dollars a year coming out in equity crowdfunding I'm not assuming that none of those crowdfunding projects actually make a bunch of money because if they do of what of that money is likely to be reinvested so what I'm basically suggesting is that there is a potential for this enormous investment in building the cool future if we could get equity crowdfunding fully legitimized and I think it's gonna have to be done with what change for technical reasons and if that happens you could begin to see this rolling reinvestment of a pile of money large enough to actually look at

[41:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gVri8wVGPc&t=2498s) projects like Concord and say maybe we should redo that with modern technology right certainly there's a whole pile of highly risky things that it would be to take a crack at doing and Neal Steffensen talks about this 10 kilometer high tower and it's actually fairly credible that you can use current material science above 10 kilometer high tower and his approach to space who maybe we should just build one and see what people do with it yeah but now of a turret maybe people will hang weight off at me the other user for silence maybe they'll just drop things for fun don't really know maybe we should just build it and see what people do and I think that that kind of an approach is impossible to sell to somebody whose job it is to responsibly manage a bucket of capital right but responsibly managing capital is not how human beings made it to the 21st century we made it by being gonzo right we made it by being crazy I've got this idea we're going to go across the desert on the other side I think they're gonna be more trees you're mad yeah what's your point okay let's go right and you know of course most of them die in the desert but the ones that don't succeed it's impossible to get people who are charged with not losing the money to take enough risks to get real progress to get real progress what you need is this attitude that we're just going to shovel the money into the furnace wash it burn and once in a while we're going to find an enormous month of gold in there at the end of the alchemical process and equity crowdfunding is the way that we could open that river of money up so that we could take all of this wealth which is being poured into the pockets of the technical elite who are bored with the reality that we have given them and we could give them the social mechanisms to turn that money into unbelievable technological acceleration which is more or less the only hope that we actually have of fixing the fundamental problems of the planet that we're all right right now we've got 10 billion people what 7 at the moment headed for 10 we've got an incredibly rapidly shrinking not to a resource base because of things like spreading forests and global warming and nobody's really looking at this seriously because the government's are just too small-minded to really really really face oh my god it's all broken what are we gonna do I have no idea just can't talk about that and still get elected but what if you get this kind of equity crowdfunding approach for things like radical environmental right not charities because charities don't scale right I'm they do things like take five billion was it half a

[44:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gVri8wVGPc&t=2648s) billion dollars for Haiti and then build six houses this whole recent Red Cross report oh my god what net pull out in a blockchain and then execute everybody that screwed those people um no we could actually get into this kind of position where most of the world's high technology development is funded by equity crowd funding from overpaid nerds who love gadgets and that demographic has enough money that it can outspend the state armed most of the big corporations relatively easily we could get our flying cars and I think the only missing component is an effective equity crowdfunding platform right and it needs a legal and it's technically it's phenomenon it might be 50 platforms rather than one but I can't see any flaw in the basic argument that if you want to blow the doors off innovation at a global level this is the missing piece right other things that might get out of this Society of stakeholders bridges viaducts saw wind farms all the rest that can fundamentally boring but where are these stuff I think that getting the people that go over a bridge to actually raise the money to build the bridge on the basis that they'll be paying their tolls into their own pockets seems like a fairly reasonable approach I bet that on what's the place is very work you would also get a redouble three democratization of the way that we manage critical infrastructure and I think that's an extremely important thing in the long run because you know who owns the means of production right that's my friend Jay spring it says whom ohms and means are not dying they've got a political analysis toolkit called stacked a vis 'm which is all about analyzing ownership of critical infrastructures way of understanding the shape of societies all of that stuff is fundamentally fungible transformable using equity crowdfunding models if you could figure out how to let people buy these shares in a bridge that they're then going to pay tolls to cross it's the same kind of unification of users and owners that you see when we were talking about the example of what would happen if we'd equity crowdfunding no reason that we couldn't do it and it's a way of doing Democratic ownership that doesn't involve going through the mechanisms of a nation-state stakeholder society mrs. Thatcher would almost certainly prove that doesn't mean it's a bad idea yeah right I think I pretty much covered that gets you most of the same benefits forgot my partner gets you most of the same benefits as you'd get from nationalizing an industry without having to nationalize an industry right you

[46:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gVri8wVGPc&t=2798s) know this decentralized Democratic ownership of assets without having to put the entire thing under the military authority of a nation-state in order to divert collectivized right small-scale petty bourgeoisie collectivization you could think of these things as being cooperatives but however you want to think of them fundamentally there's this you know potential for hugely spreading the ownership among the people that are using the assets because they will be the ones that are most likely to buy in when the thing is floated right now are people board yeah or do we want to go on another what meander oh my god okay okay

[47:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gVri8wVGPc&t=2841s) let me just check we check how we're doing for time because if we the political thing taping a minute or two to actually go ten minutes with this is I think the second whilst slide so we're okay for time right so the Left believes that the people who work in a factory should own the profit that comes out in the factory the right believes that the people who financed the factory should own the profits that come from the factory and that's more or less the entire west right political debate in a nutshell Marxism was an industrial age ideology and couldn't beat anything else maoism it's another story right so right now when you take away value that the wealth is created by industrial production the left and the right completely disintegrates into a little cloud of purple sparks they're just this vanish right as soon as you're no longer talking about an industrial generation of wealth left and right become meaningless so people often ask me oh they left or right it's look I'm post-industrial and I cannot find any meaningful redefinition of left and right for a post-industrial society left and right our Industrial Age concepts so what I'm basically gonna suggest is this if you're talking about very very broad-based Democratic ownership of assets on the basis that anybody that had a little wealth could buy in you are still talking about butuan democracy the genuinely poor people come and participate in a crowdfunded system because they don't have any equity to put in in the first place right right now the only people we get access to equity is a vehicle or the very rich if the minimum slab to get involved in a game is five million only the very rich are in there and the vast majority of the returns in our society go in games which were five million as your basic swap once you begin to spread that and you get down to say $100 is your basic squad you get a much much much much more democratic engagement in the creation of your infrastructure many many more people have an opinion that counts because anybody can get involved in those kind of issues but it's very important to not analyze this stuff inside of a left-right framework because if you try and sell this idea of micro capitalist investment in local utilities as being an idea of the left it sounds like you're democratizing things you're

[49:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gVri8wVGPc&t=2991s) bringing about local ownership and it's the co-operative movement all over again on the other hand if you talk about it from the right it sounds like what you're talking about is bringing a you know real financial instruments into the reach of for more people that have them already so it makes sense both from a kind of left perspective on to a right perspective well it doesn't make sense from as an authoritarian perspective right and there's lots of authoritarians on the left and the right that are profoundly against notions of equity crowdfunding because for God's sake you would want people just run around and band together to go and buy things into existence that you think should be there that should be our job we're here to allocate society's capital not you right building mechanisms to let the people who own societies capital allocate society's capital by cutting the transaction costs and cutting the red tape is not a strategy that make sense you need to wear for right terms it's a strategy that makes sense along a political access which has not yet been defined because we have not yet seen the Hayek or the marks for the post-industrial age right now post-industrial politics is a wasteland nobody even remotely begins to understand the political economy and the economic geography which are the fundamental generators and wealth and the societies that we're in nobody's got the political economy or economic geography as a result all the politics are just floating in space because you can't find an accurate map and you can't figure out where the money and the power are right so part of the reason this whole kind of equity crowdfunding thing has such a hard time gaining political support is because it's so difficult to explain to people why it is in their political interests the equity crowdfunding is the standard way of funding society right I don't even think the libertarians really understand this it's obviously a great idea for libertarians but there is no political ideology that says decentralization of ownership by opening up micro equity is a critical part of democratization of the functions of the state and that's the thesis right it's not it right oh wait I forgot about the fun stuff on the end just one more thing so there are

[52:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gVri8wVGPc&t=3121s) four technologies that are currently going completely nuclear they're just melting down reality blockchains oh my god but you all knew that virtual reality and augmented reality has anybody recently strapped a phone to their face right two hands so they have all my phones were there recording game hope it's still running fantastic right so all of this new VR gear you strap off this is not phone but you strap a phone to your face with a couple of plastic lenses of cardboard box Google cardboard is one such brand samsung has a thing called gear yeah really just amazing right and you look around and you get stereo depth perception of the world only it's not the world that you're looking at it's a different world and it were right the good stuff is really good the cheap stuff is also really good it's good enough good Christmas of this year I believe that are going to be something like six systems like that on the market on sale of Christmas present prices right yeah you bet right and that's coming that's I think that's this year is that this Christmas after drones last year right exactly so by the end of this year I don't know a third of the teenagers in America from middle-class households will have virtual reality gear that's a really substantial change in things I had my first virtual reality experience in 1991 second twenty six years for that 25 years for that technology to arrive 24 years ok so once it arrives right once this stuff is actually here you're gonna see this sudden fracturing because it's a technological jump that society as a whole is not ready for and because society is a whole is not ready for it it's going to be demonize in the worst possible way right it's just like you know all of the cyberpunk literature or cyberpunk literature in the nineteen seventies 1880s 1890s all of that tearing between the regular people and their kids who are gargling around it won't come up with their virtual realities all of that stuff is just gonna go boom it's going to be hilarious possibly awful right but it's coming and nothing can stop it and nobody's ready technology meltdown nobody knows what to do it's coming oh my god it's the sound excite I'm excited right what terrified but I mean I've

[54:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gVri8wVGPc&t=3271s) been waiting for virtual reality my entire adult life and finally it's here and it's cheap because your kid already has an iPhone and it's an iPhone force of cardboard box what and the notion that the phone you know the TV and an eight the phone and eight the web browser and eight the phone camera and eight the recorder and eight that Walkman and now it's about to eat the virtual reality you know the fool is rapidly becoming this unique powerful you know like magical artifact so by the end of this year deep in virtual reality that works massive sales campaigns telling people how cool the virtual world is people will be piling into that like there's no tomorrow and drones robots internet things every time I see another drone like you know some kid will be rummaging around in their back pocket but it's not orange thing you know one and a half inch square drone 10-minute flight time you control it by balancing it with your phone and it's got automatic hovering pretty to get that was a buck fifty from China I found it in the back of a you know cereal packet you know the world is rapidly turning into drones and robots that actually work nobody's yet figured out what they're for yeah but I don't think that we've thought long before Amazon will do like drone delivery to your picnic you know did you run out of cheese beer delivery at festivals medical uses in flying samples around in hospital there could be all kinds of uses but once that process begins the notion that you actually have to physically carry things from place to place rather than having a drone come and fetch it and carry it for you right could you run this key over to Bob please you know uber droning keys around the city of course that only works because you haven't modernized your box yeah but you know there's lots of physical movement of stuff that will just evaporate errand running just goes away um not quite the same kind of discontinuous boom that we're gonna see with virtual reality this year but coming along very nicely a 3d printers I'd also put in there if I think that's still five years out for really making a difference finally artificial intelligence not in the sense of artificial people that in terms of problem solving is now a fact right computers could finally tell the difference between a cat and a dog more effective within a human being right travel planning give me a system that says I want to meet these seven people find me the cheapest and easiest location in Europe for us all to meet and it goes all the way through the travel systems we could do that tomorrow Watson right medical diagnosis and it can answer pop quiz questions why we don't have a clean interface where you can just ask question Watson for a fiver

[57:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gVri8wVGPc&t=3421s) or not come back with an answer I don't know yet Watson what is the best HDTV send $5 cheaper twice the price SoundHound yeah what a centime do Wow so some powder so it's basically so it's basically usable artificial intelligence on a phone silent and okay fantastic crap so it's called sample so really that's amazing oh I want to see this right so blockchains are going nuclear VR&E are going nuclear drones robots internet things will grow nuclear and artificial intelligence is going nuclear right boom who's gonna fund the areas for these things intersects with each other given the individual each one of these things is right at the limit of our current up bureaucratic appetite for risk yeah that's my suggestion right if each one of these things is already up the limit of VC appetite for risk the intersections between these things will definitionally be too risky for VCS to go into so my suggestion is that we take this kind of ultra technology apocalypse thing which is currently happening this year next year in four that's five years and we figure out how to build equity crowdfunding vehicles so that we could take the excess cash of ten million nerds and use it as a ten billion dollar a year funnel to get our body flying cars funded right because we've got the possibility of unbelievable technological acceleration in the intersection between these technologies but it's going to involve enormous amongst a really expensive technical labor doing more or less trial and error and my suggestion is that we basically close the loop on the dot-com ecosystem and have the Nerds fund their friends the other nerds to do this stuff in micro capital enterprises as a way of rapidly cooling these technologies into existence in domains where venture capital is simply too risk-averse because they don't understand that it is

[59:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gVri8wVGPc&t=3571s) their job to burn money in a furnace to make alchemical gold and that is my point done I think that is the last slide oh no there's another one damn it well okay I've basically run out of brain for this but very briefly through the remainder to write weather multitudes our elites own the future comes down whether you get equity crowdfunding that works therefore it's critical we get equity crowdfunding the Forex that's the protocol case I'm not going to explore the ramifications that I've just run out of alts funding this free speech right that whistle hold on for other more sites and it's worth thinking about this and and it just run out of run our brain so funding this free speech if funding is Performa below the speech Act ie I say give Bob five pounds that it does okay Bitcoin there is absolutely no way that you could prevent people equity crowdfunding things into existence as an exercise of their democratic right to free speech right free speech arguments behind funding on blockchains of the critical way of deregulating the damn things because you're either gonna regulate my speech and tell me that I'm not allowed to say this or you're gonna basically tell me that I am free is because I like and because in this environment the speed charts are performative there's no way it get away from deregulating these systems we're thinking about finally right the actual last slight institutions right the current institutions are completely unable to actually get their head around reality because the institution of the institution is centuries or millennia all depending on how you count right reality has speeded up by a factor of maybe a thousand since we decided that we were going to have MPs sit for four years at Westminster and we were going to elect them by boroughs of 20,000 people voting right the acceleration in every other part of reality has gone completely out of control but we still govern at the same speed that we did 200 years ago right 4 year electoral democracy is an idea which is 200 years old if you told Thomas Jefferson that 200 years in the future when we had airplanes we would still be using representative democracy he'd slap you right if the American Founding Fathers were redesigning American democracy today to represent the will of the people is there any possibility that

[1:02:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gVri8wVGPc&t=3721s) they would can't with the system that we currently use no clearly no there's no way that they could possibly justify it as an efficient use of resources so once we understand that the purpose of the government is to perform capital allocation on behalf of the people we could use equity crowdfunding approaches to allow the people to do their own capital allocation right and if you can fund your roads and your bridges and your spaceships and you can fund all the goofy stuff like I want an artificially intelligent Snoopy that can I can see through the eyes of using VR if we get all of those things simultaneously running on these came to actor 2 crowdfunding platforms the possibility is that we could start to dismantle the need for the nation-state far in advance of its collapse for example I think that if you had a fish and equity crowdfunding solutions in Greece right now an awful lot of people would be using them as ways of maintaining the kind of critical stuff that they're doing right now it's did it run out of battery or disk space that's good enough so when we get right down to it I think we could put all of these systems together into our single proposal which is democratization of society and massive acceleration of technological change as a single package right could anybody really say no to that right so massive acceleration of technological change and democratization of society all of that is encompassed insider equity crowdfunding the technological change is what you get when you equity crowdfunding GaN Jets and the democratization of society is what you get when you crowd fund critical infrastructure like bridges and roads and we do both of these things simultaneously on the same we girl framework on the same tentacle framework and if we get that right I think we get the open future that everybody's fundamentally wanted so finally the third false ending I am actually done thank you

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End of [296] Vinay Gupta - Transparent Society - Crowdfunding on Blockchains / Ethereum, part 2 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [171](https://guptaoption.com/texts/171.md) Taming Black Elephants (2015); the most closely related, [299](https://guptaoption.com/texts/299.md) Mic audio: Coase's Blockchain: can equity crowdfunding... (2015); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.