# Ilaria R. and Vinay Gupta discuss the Ethereum Project and theories of political change (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [301], 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, 2015-05-12 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU. 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 as a way to represent people states can't see.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out of ideas (2010): One-page paper: the richest fifth are eating the planet, so the next economy has to be at peace with other... (suggested by machine)
  - 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)
  - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - 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)
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (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: Bitcoin, libertarianism & the state (30%); Rural poverty & development infrastructure (14%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Mars (12 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Cypherpunks (4 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); smart property (3 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Namecoin (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); repudiable payments (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); political change (3 here; 25 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); crypto war (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); John Perry Barlow (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); DNS (2 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Barlow (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2013)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): crypto war; Namecoin; repudiable payments
- Importance: core-text score 0.24 (1.00 is the top), number 320 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [706] [Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin - with Vinay Gupta | Virtual... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/706.md): close in content (cosine 0.97)
  - [851] [Global governance in the era of blockchain. (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/851.md): close in content (cosine 0.96)
- On the same works, just before: [113] [The Ethereum Launch Process | Ethereum Foundation Blog (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/113.md); [380] [A new way to describe blockchains (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/380.md); [302] [Vinay Gupta - Protecting History (blockchains) Maker... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/302.md)
- On the same works, just after: [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); [295] [Singapore talk (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/295.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: Ilaria R. and Vinay Gupta discuss the Ethereum Project and theories of political change, video, 2015-05-12, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [301], https://guptaoption.com/texts/301.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=0s) Today I'll be speaking to Vinay Gupta, strategic consultant for FDE, cypherpunk and allaround futurist who is here to talk to us about his views on Ethereum and a decentralized future. Thanks for joining us, Pine. How are you today? The usual. Good. I'm actually enjoying because it's beginning to warm up a little. Yeah, it's really cold. It's really sunny. So to start off with, can

[0:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=22s) you just tell us a little bit about what you do at Ethereum? Um, so basically this is my second pass through the whole kind of cryptocurrency mess. Uh, I started out with a thing called E-old in the late 1990s and did that pretty intensively for a couple years. So a lot of what I'm kind of here doing is that I've had the experience of seeing the entire cycle play out once before. I kind of know where some of the landmines and booby traps are and I have some perspective. Um, plus, you know, I've learned a lot about how change gets made in the world. And it's very hard to know these things if the team is predominantly made of people that are very young. You need a diversity of perspective in the team, you know, from young to old, male, female, different cultures, uh, different backgrounds, different professional skills. So, I'm basically holding down some chunk of that. And you've been involved in crypto and decentralization for a long time. Why do you think that the development of these kind of technologies has grown so much in the last couple of years?

[1:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=83s) Um, so basically, uh, there's a thing called Southerntherland's Wheel Reincarnation, um, from a very old computer graphics, uh, guy, um, Evans, I can't remember, Ivan Southerntherland, who was part of an act called Evans and Southerntherland that were doing computer graphic workstations in like the 1960s, super early work. And Southern talks about how things go from being software to hardware to software to hardware to software to hardware in a cycle. So you start out with something that's a piece of software. It gets slow. You build some hardware to accelerate it. It gets fast. You put new stuff on top of the software. It gets slowed down. So we've been at this absolute pinnacle, this apex of centralization with the web, right? enormous factoriesized data centers sitting there in you know a few dozen locations in the world just crunching out everybody's bits under the control of half a dozen enormous companies which Bruce Carl Sterling calls the stacks so Google Yahoo Apple uh Microsoft and whatever the other one is right so you know uh these enormous entities kind of um they have the software they have the hardware they have the legal power. They've got tight ties to governments to some degree. They're extensions of first world foreign policy and everything that owns the internet has basically become centralized these kind of silos. And the

[2:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=168s) next thing that happens historically is almost that you get a swing back in the other direction. So I think that this is something where you know there's just no further to go in the centralized direction. It's obvious that the decentralization swing is here. It's here because of cheap solar panels. It's here because of better ways programming computers. It's here because the amount of computer power you can fit in your, you know, cell phone is now enough to do all your general purpose computing needs. It's not really a need to access the server. You know, you put all these things together. It's a confluence of forces and historical timing. Uh, and then you get the Snowden leaks, which of course set the entire scene on fire because everybody realizes that the stuff that had been paranoia is now a matter of historical record, right? There's no longer any way to turn around to the cypherpunks and say, "Oh, you guys were just paranoid." Actually, no. If anything, we understated the claim, and by the way, we told you so. So, all of these things together suddenly have given us this platform from which we've got the necessary breadth of cultural support plus the entire Bitcoin miracle of suddenly we've got activists with money and you put all that together,

[3:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=235s) something has happened. So what do you think about anonymous when happened during the Arabic spring? Something that it's like kind of example of decentralization. Yeah, you bet. Well, I mean, you know, if you keep assassinating people's political leaders, they'll learn to decentralize. Yeah. Right. I mean, to be completely frank about it, we saw 50 years of political assassination as the predominant tool of international policy by the Western countries. Right. There's a list on uh Wikipedia of all the political leaders in Africa that were assassinated with Western involvement. It's not surprising that eventually you get a mutation in tactics, which is radical decentralization, not having leaders who can be picked off and then cryptography being bundled into that to make a change. The problem I have with an is um firstly they've been heavily infiltrated so they're no longer as effective as they were. You know, the FBI and all these guys are not fools. Secondly, what exactly are they in favor of? Right? I mean, if people are going to be using this kind of sort of, you know, cyber terrorism type tactics, we're going to break into your business and we're going to publish everything. So what? Right? Like, you know, how exactly is this going to fix global warming? How is it going to do something about a billion poor people? How is it going to change the real political problems of the world? Because if you're going to use this kind of extreme force, and it is extreme force, this is violence of a kind, if governments were doing it to individuals, we'd have no doubt that it was criminal. Um, if you're going to use these kind of tactics, you know, with what agenda, right? I want to see a really strong sense where fundamental liberties and rights are being more respected because this stuff is going on. Otherwise, it's basically and vandalism. And I think that anonymous has sailed very close to that line on a number of occasions. And there's no way to hold it accountable because you actually did this. And to me, this is this balance of you get decentralization, you get the power going to the edge, but once the power is at the edge, what happens when somebody abuses it? And what about countries like

[5:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=356s) China where you have no free access on internet? That would be a solution or is it will take long time? What do you think? Well, I f firmly believe that the Chinese internet is probably less monitored than the American internet is. Okay, it's just more humans and less machines. But, you know, if we think about what we know about the NSA's reach into people's lives, there is no denying that there is an enormous impact and I don't think it's any worse in China than it is anywhere else. Right? They've got their watchers, we've got our watchers, but at the end of the day, the watchers are watching Dam near everything. And we still don't have the cultural rhetoric around this, right? I mean, when we refer to the world as basically, you know, 1984 with Wi-Fi, right? You know, wow, it's the wireless telescreen. Isn't that amazing? You want to see the wireless telescreen? Um, the new wireless telescreen 6 with improved features. And we haven't really culturally caught up to wireless telescreen. You know, we haven't really fully taken on that. We have more surveillance than was predicted in 1984. We have more medication than was predicted in Brave New World, right? We're at a kind of dystopic apex. And what you see with this, you know, the political and techno uh technosocial change that are being driven is the possibility of comprehensively reversing the gradual 1984 ending of the world, right? And I think that we are much further towards that reversal than people realize. you know, things like Bitcoin and Ethereum and all the rest of that, much as they're surrounded by a bunch of dumb political rhetoric, actually hold the technical keys to taking a bunch of the pressure that is turning the state into a monster back off it. You know, nothing could fulfill all the responsibilities that we've loaded onto the state. And until we pull some of that back onto other institutions and solve the problem, the state is always going to be this overburdened gorilla with a bad temper. Wow. Yeah. You can really separate politics and how we make use of technologies. Absolutely. Yeah. And

[8:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=481s) talking of a more detective aspect, so explaining these new technologies to people, it's quite hard. What would would you like to find a way to make this really accessible? Well, I mean, you know, in as much as it's my job, yes, but also the rate limiting step of adoption is understandable. Um, so I'm pretty convinced that everything that has been done to try and explain to blockchains to people so far is not only wrong but actively harmfully wrong. Okay, reason is this, right? Um, you know, the older database technology that the world runs on is called SQL SQL and there's a section at the beginning of saving something into a SQL database called committing a transaction. Almost all of the magic in this whole kind of blockchain ecosystem is in the committing a transaction part of what an SQL database does, right? So all this stuff about consensus algorithms and you know reward and payouts and mining and proof of work and proof of stake and all the rest of that hierarchy is all in this tiny section of the system called committing a transaction. So we're basically running around in the street saying, "Hey, come and look at our amazing way of committing a transaction. We could commit a transaction in 71 new ways. They're all amazingly clever." Nobody gives a monkey, right? You know, you don't even really care about the database. We have some notion that databases are problematic when they're big in the reviews, but really, unless you're technical, database, database, you know, you really just want the website to work. And the fact is that we've already got this enormously esoteric powerful technology hidden deep inside of the databases that enables corporations and governments to exist. But the fact that we've got a better newer way of doing that is completely irrelevant to the general public. We've changed something deep in the labyrinthine bowels of the technology. The result of that change is you get a new generation of tools. Those tools have some really new different properties like decentralization. But we are so tied up in this new thing about committing transactions that we don't have any real language for telling people what the new stuff that they can now do with that is. Um I I only really just worked this out in the last couple of weeks. I went to I think called on Trans Media Alley in Berlin and gave this completely psychotic talk about the worship of the database gods and the you know notion the SQL is the fundamental operating system of the civilization because it's a bunch of internet arch types they need entertaining. And what I realized halfway through saying that was that it was literally true you know that we had actually built an entire civilization on

[10:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=631s) the model the data model contained within SQL. Um because if you can't fit it into an SQL database, it doesn't exist to business, it doesn't exist at the state, it's unrepresentable truth. So it's

[10:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=644s) really about like people need to be aware there exists a new model of internet that can be used. Yeah. Yes. Yes. It's something it's a new way of using internet and it's and it's seven layers up from the conversation we keep having, right? We keep explaining blockchains to people. If these people didn't know about database transactions, they don't need to know about blockchains. They just need to see the decentralized internet. What does decentralized internet even mean to ordinary people, right? Facebook with no monitoring maybe. But do they really care about monitoring? If they cared about monitoring, maybe they wouldn't be using Facebook. You feel really absurd at the end when you have cookies and you realize that you're just like a marketing profile on internet. Um, but is that enough for us to change our behavior to use the new technology when we have access to it? But it's not just simply Facebook. It can be used like in elections and can be used for like reasons that are like much more important in society. Well, can you imagine if Mark Zuckerberg ran for president of America? You know, you could just manipulate everything on Facebook to try and make that happen. Are we really sure? You know, I there are good strong arguments for political decentralization uh that go right into the heart of defending democracy. But people don't even understand that they are watched and they are just used in internet. That's a point maybe, right? Are we all aware of this? So

[12:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=726s) here's the communications challenge, right? You take this new technology for committing database stuff, right? Okay, we've got the new tech. Now with that new technology, how exactly do people's lives change in ways that they care about, right? So if you do anything to do with finance, Ethereum, Bitcoin, and all the rest of this stuff, that is going to change your world. Right? They have really big substantial unsolved problems in those industries that they just don't have the computer technology to fix and we're about to give it to them. So no denying the financial world is going to change. But beyond that in terms of broader cultural change, you know, pulling the eyes back out of our computers so that our computers will work for us rather than for other people. you know, squashing the online advertising industry that re reacts to everything that we do by showing us different adverts. You know, these are really big political changes. Is it um is it S Paulo in Brazil that has banned all street advertising? I don't know. You just go outside into the city and there are no billboards anywhere. Wow. Right. And you know, civilization didn't collapse. We'd all find our quality of life improved by doing that. We haven't done it. Right. all through our society. You know, every time you go to the internet, the thing is wrapping this envelope of data around you trying to figure out how to give you what you want. And that would all be very well apart from the fact that it's from people that want your money rather than from people that are trying to be on your side. Yeah. Can we really expect to fix that with a new technology for database commits? Well, if we built the existing society on the back of SQL, the notion you could build a new society on the basis of a blockchain maybe isn't quite so absurd, right? But you know, you you see it's this maze of potential ways of telling the story and you know, we're in the very early stage and navigating through that maze of potential stories. And also people in Africa that they can have access to internet or they didn't have access to a bank account. Oh yeah.

[14:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=846s) Yeah. That would change. I mean very fast, right? I mean a lot of my interest in this area was about, you know, I have this hexayurt shelter that I work on. Yes. Now would be a great point time to put a picture of a hexayurt on the screen. Um so cracking up behind the camera. So um you know I have this hex and one of the things that I'm intending to do with this is build temporary cities. We've got about 60 million refugees. We're expecting another 200 million climate refugees. That's not even just temporary cities. It's temporary countries. And if we're going to build these kind of temporary countries, you need to be able to do things like issue passports, issue currency, contract, certification of things like university degrees. You know, if you are some refugee in a with internet access, broadband, and Android tablet, by year 10, you've got a PhD. By year 15, you're working on, you know, your second book. Wow. Right. Yeah. I look at universities, you know, the refugee camps as potential universities. We don't let them work for economic gain. That's part of the condition of being refugees. You're not really supposed to have a job. So, if you give them internet access and access to the university system, right? You've been in chang world. Yeah. You know, imagine if we've got if we're paying for these people to eat and have a computer and have a place to live, right? if and that's going to be going on for 15 or 20 years, that is more time for these people to do research and education than we're paying for for anybody else in the world. So, you could literally have tens of millions of extremely highly educated poor people that we're already paying all the costs for, right? And then you look at that and say, well, how are we going to make this happen? Immediately you begin down that path, you're going to hit huge problems with the software. The ability to issue a permanent identity credential that somebody can use. The ability to certify that somebody has completed a unit of coursework when they don't have a passport. You know, medical record storage, the entire question of how you give government services to people without governments, right? You know, providing a central bank of the internet and issuing money to where there was previously no money. Dumb, right? Issuing government services with no government. Yeah, it can happen. It's possible. Well, well, yeah, if we can manage DNS, right, if you know the domain name system, right? So, you type in amazon.com, you go to a database, you pull out a record, it gives you the IP address of Amazon. Your computer then

[16:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=996s) navigates across the internet to that IP address and Amazon services hides me, right? All of that system is framed inside of complex government structures,

[16:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=1003s) right? Icon and the mandate for the name system and the American government's ownership of the com domain and all the rest. the HTTPS standards and all the work around that. All of this stuff came out of the state. Unsurprisingly, the state monitored all of it, right? We could solve the problem of what does this name refer to on the internet without going through the entire structure of for example the UN. So you take something like namecoin shows the possibility if we get something that can do name resolution you know so that we don't have to go through for example the n the national domain systems.co co.uk.it. Mhm. Why? Why did we pull all this nation state crap with us onto the internet? For God's sake, what were we thinking? Why do we do it? Well, because we're idiots, okay? You know, we've only been down from the trees for 2 million years. We've only had farming for 10,000 years. We've only had common reading, right, reading and writing for a few hundred years. It's not that surprising that we keep making these kind of mistakes. But the possibility to push the nation state back out of the internet because we can solve the problems of managing things like name spaces without requiring it. We can solve the security problems online without requiring it. If you've got escort and arbitration, you don't need to sue somebody which means you don't need a court. you know that notion that we could restore a kind of bubble of you know we the people are organizing our own affairs on the internet kind of environment which was originally the dream right you go back to John Perry Barlow's declaration the independence of cyerspace you know for a long time that looked like a joke and you know we're now kind of like possibly it's possible maybe but you know I'm not talking about this in the sense of a flat out all France revolution What I'm talking about is the notion of a self-governing library where people buy and sell stuff on a stall out front. Right? So, academia where independence and autonomy are extremely important. Certain kinds of commerce which are not immediately going to affect people by, for example, their car becoming uh destroyed or going on fire, right? You know, if I'm selling you a comic book that exists as a PDF file, it's highly unlikely that I'm going to be able to kill you using this. So maybe I don't need to be regulated. On the other hand, if I'm selling you a car and something breaks, it could kill a whole bunch of people. Probably we do need regulation. So the notion that we could take the things which are inherently physically

[19:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=1153s) safe because they're purely virtual and provide a kind of global unregulated commons in which people could transact in these ways without needing state oversight. To me, this is just an extension of academic privilege. It was necessary for the independence of academia for the pursuit of learning, the creation of culture. It continues to be necessary. If we have to use cryptography and pointy sex to make sure that that continues to be the case, I do not think anybody has the right to tell us this is a bad idea. And this is a much milder position than a lot of the cypherpunks have. It's a much milder position the crypto anarchists have or the libertarians even. But I think that it is the absolute minimum ask, right? The absolute minimum that we should insist on is that we have a censorship free communication medium in which information can be exchanged, right, for anybody without without any state coming down on them regardless of what they say, right? An insistence that there is space with global free speech rights. And I think

[20:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=1214s) that any state that tells us we can't have that needs a solid poke, right? But, you know, whether or not we're going to get that vision or whether we're going to try for something much more violent, much more destructive, and much more radical, you know, Bitcoin in Greece, right? Yeah. You know, you know, uh, what is it? Rujava, am I saying that correctly? the the Kurdish refugee, the Kurdish state, you know, they have this kind of anosynicalist enclave in the contested areas of Syria where the Kurds are basically operating a kind of anarchist free state and fighting the war against ISIS. This is happening right now, right? I didn't know about that. I'll be honest. It's really, really, really intense stuff, right? So, you know, if I'm talking about this notion of a kind of digital library where we take over on our own affairs, there are plenty of other people who are talking about digital javas or even worse taking this kind of technology down to Rojava, handing out to the rebels and seeing what happens. What happens? Well, nobody knows. Okay, but on that spectrum, right, there are things which are extremely clandestine and extremely dangerous because this is after all cryptography. And there are things which are direct continuation of pre-existing good practices like academic freedom, freedom of speech. And from my perspective, all the time that we spend on the difficult dangerous violent end of that is pulling away attention from the ability to get a certain set of global minimums in place. Right? You know, I've watched the cypher movement for 20 years tear itself to pieces because of anti-state rhetoric. And in that time, we could have built global freedom of speech. We could have built academic freedom. We could have built a whole bunch of useful stuff. But because of the anti-state focus, we never created things that were necessary. But this is about the fact that maybe freedom of speech is something that like governments don't really want. So that's why where does that come from? Like as you were saying, if you just focus on bad things, you can never develop, you can never like grow. So it's yeah, it's a question of strategy. It's a question.

[22:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=1337s) Question balance. Okay. And you know, we started this by talking about anonymous. Yeah. If you lay out this spectrum from protecting global freedom of speech and protecting academic freedom on one end to poking the state with a sharp stick because you think it's naughty on the other. Autonomous are all the way over at that end. Okay. The biggest institutional failure from the 1960s generation was that they built no new institutions. for all of the energy and effort that went into the 1960s about the only tangible concrete new institution that came out of that was Nuropa University and that's about it. It's about the only thing that was built in the 60s that is still a blasting piece of infrastructure. Look at the 1990s cypherpunks. You know what have we built? GPG, HTTPS. That's about it, right? Hardly anybody was using GPG. It was like half of one maintainer, right? SSL was what, two, you know, one man with a dog on a string. You know, we got practically nothing done because we picked the wrong side. We conceived of ourselves as being a bunch of Jedi fighting the Empire. And it turns out that the empire is what's feeding people, housing people, clothing people, making sure their vaccines are safe, and so on. Yeah, it's doing a bunch of bad stuff, too. Nobody's ready to overthrow the empire. But keeping the empire out of academia, protecting the libraries, and extending trade privileges to the very poorest, who's going to object to that, right? And you know, much as we think that this whole thing about Ethereum and Bitcoin and all the rest of that, much as we think of these things as being technologies, it's much more, right? Yeah. Bitcoin only has value because libertarians agreed that Bitcoin had value, right? No libertarian movement. Bitcoin would have been an appetite technology. It would never have had users that were willing to invest in it. It would never have become anything tangible. So my hope is that Ethereum will wind up sufficiently towards the constructive creative building end of the equation that we stay out of the kind of political struggles around things like anonymous. We don't get completely hoovered up into Wall Street like you see for uh Bitcoin, but we can find this niche which is we make enough money doing financially useful things that it is useful. We also provide this publishing platform where people have freedom of speech and academic freedom and we generally stay out with crypto war because at the end of the day my generation tried that and the one thing that people should learn is the cypherpunks got bugger all done at least in our generation. So what would you like

[24:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=1485s) to see built on top of Ethereum? Well I mean I want to be able to issue passports to refugees that give them an identity that nobody else will. Right. And that's a good starting point. It's pretty simple. And once we've got identities, it would be nice to be able to do credentials for things like, you know, if you're uh if you had full medical training as a doctor and you have been driven out your city because, you know, it's being shelled and you're now a refugee with no identity paperwork. We're in desperate need of doctors. We need to be able to recredential you. Yeah. And you can do it well. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how we're going to do it, but we can, you know, give me a scriptable blockchain or off we go to the races. Um, I also, you know, people talk about smart property as if it's this big complicated thing, but I also want to buy, um, you know, one or two secondhand cameras, you know, one 2000 things that were really good gear, but are now 5 or 10 years old, but very nice equipment and have these things live on the blockchain. So, if I give you the camera Mhm. you pay the camera 10% of the value of a camera into a fund and that fund pays for the camera's insurance. Okay. And after that camera has been passed around for a while, you know, it's loaned to people or given, oh, you're going on holiday and you want to take you don't want to take your camera cuz you might break it when you take the loaner. After these cameras have been around long enough, they might have enough money behind them that they could kind of um fork and the camera could buy a new camera. Oh wow. Right. So you would wind up with this pool of sharable property that because you pay a little every time you use it, the camera gradually accumulates value and you could wind up with a pool of heavily used secondhand camera equipment that would otherwise be rotting in some shop. Sounds really good. It's a nice large project, right? Yeah. Smart property, right? It's not a self-driving car that stalks the streets at night looking for cheap fairs. But, you know, there are really productive, useful, interesting, social things you can do in that setting. And I think that we all quite like a world with a lot of that in it. You know, it's a little bit kind of, you know, this is a bit less eBay and a bit more Etsy. But in terms of improving

[26:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=1611s) people's quality of life, you know, it's not all about big stuff. the ability for a web designer to sit down for a couple of days, read some documentation, write a script that's two or three pages long, and at the end of that have implemented smart property for camera share, I think we're going to see a ton of really useful, interesting, creative stuff and particularly because it directly empowers designers. If you can get through two or three pages of code, right, which is what web designers, right? If you write JavaScript 20% of the time, you can write an Ethereum contract. Um, they can then take that and deploy it on an enormous scale using this decentralized network without having to get venture capital, without having to hire a system administrator, without having to figure out how to deploy on Amazon, all the rest of those systems. So, I think we could see tons and tons and tons of really interesting creative projects, some of which might become the next Facebook or the next OKC cupid or the next Amazon, right? but which could start from relatively small projects done by tiny little teams. So um the thing about uh being able to take a single programmer or designer and have them be able to scale something globally is super important. Right? Right now we've got this filter which is there are only really two ways to deploy software. You can go through the commercial route and deploy software as a service and you turn into something like Amazon or you can go the open source route and you deploy the software on somebody's laptop. So they've got download it and install it and set it all up and all the rest of this stuff and you could go through the app store model which I guess is a third branch. So the notion that we could have a way of deploying software that has the scale of software as a service but can be deployed by an individual without having to download it right you know it completely changes the ability for say you know software artisans software creators to put their ideas in front of other people right it's a it's a new publishing platform for software and right now you know if you write some enormously cool doohickey right that people love to use your website maxes out5 or10,000 simultaneous users and you got a web hosting bill for $2,000, right? Right. Maybe we need some advertising on that to pay the bills. H well, now we're part of the advertising industrial complex and we don't feel good about the project anymore. So the

[29:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=1750s) space between commercialized and no commercialized goes away and you can spread your ideas without like thinking I have to pay fees and I don't know how to have a budget for that, right? Yes. Oh, this is very exciting. Yeah, it's really exciting. Very exciting. anyone can do it like a young student. You don't need to have I need a job to like have money to put into my my project. Yeah. And and without having the work that you do be about monetizing corporate welfare, right? So right now if you're a filmmaker, you can make some amazing film. You could put it up on YouTube. Google will pay for it because Google gets to advertise around it. Okay? So if you're okay with working for Google, you can use their mechanisms to spread the stuff. But you also are now embedded in a system where they have all power. They have the control of the value chain. They can put adverts on it later if they choose to. You can't really do anything about it. And the entire creative audience is on their infrastructure, right? You're always under something or someone, right? So if you make something which is really controversial, they take it down. Yeah. So you're not free. You are never free. And if you're an artist, you know, how much of your work is going to be controversial, right? Most of them, right? Particularly if you're an artist that's in a country that has real political trouble, right? So if you're on any of the frontiers where there's political violence, which is like a third of the world, right? You can't actually make films about your life and put them online without Google pulling them down again, right? You try and be a Palestinian filmmaker and put your stuff on Google, but it's not just Palestine. It's Brazil. It's half of Africa. It's, you know, anywhere there is an ongoing conflict. Anywhere the government is oppressive, if you make an art about your life as it really is, somebody in the corporate world is going to pull the strings and stop that. Right. All the

[31:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=1860s) way over at the academic end, we still talk about freedom for artists, freedom to publish, freedom to create, freedom to think, and to secure that. Mhm. Right. We have to pull it across so that you can publish without having the costs acrew, you know, in a way that requires you to sell out to get there. Right. It can't be advertising supported. It can't be corporate controlled. How much human culture is currently being essentially censored because we don't have the mechanisms to pay for its distribution without putting it under the control of somebody like Google and the audience because they're so used to just clicking on the next YouTube video. You if you do put it on your own website, pay your own web hosting costs, you can't get the audience to come to you. So the hope, the dream, what if we could persuade people to move off of these corporate platforms onto new set of platforms that will keep the audience under the audience's own control and allow the artists to say whatever they have to say. Is there anything we are fearful of or people would be? You think? Well, I'm sure this is going to scare the crap out of anybody that makes a living out of either advertising or oppression. No. Oh, that's a good point. We should keep that one. But seriously, right, this notion that we are, you know, a terrible enemy to people that live by either advertising or oppression, this is not a bad set of enemies to have, right? If we are for creative freedom, if we are for artistic self expression, if we are for academic freedom, if we're for freedom of speech, then the only people that are against us are the people who are against these things. Screw them. Okay,

[32:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=1954s) that's it. Now this is not to say that this kind of technology couldn't be abused but the set of technologies that we are developing are heavily biased towards creative self-expression freedom the ability for small groups of people to do amazing things there's a limit to how much damage you can cause using a publishing tool right I mean there's a really strict limit to how much trouble you can cause by speaking your mind on the internet and putting a digital signature on it and a blockchain is essentially just a series of statements like speech connected together in a sequence in time, right? You know, each block is a series of things that people said. Give 50 of my Bitcoin to Fred. Give 25 of my Bitcoin to Harry. Give, you know, 1.1 of my Bitcoin to George. You know, each one of those is a piece of speech digital signature of the speech sequenced in time. It's hard to imagine that this is anything other than a very secure publishing operation. And it's not even a secret publishing operation. and it's secure because it can't be changed. Um, you know, this is just how it is, right? So, it's hard to imagine that being abused, but Yeah. But, but um, we also live in a world with flying robot death squads, you know. Mhm. robot planes flown from air bases all over the world that fly around, identify people using facial recognition cameras and intercepted signals communications, satellite surveillance, and then blow them up with weapons, right? Boston Dynamics, you know, these kind of autonomous robots that look like dogs and when you kick them, they don't fall over and they run up hills and they make an enormously loud noise. Well, you know, give them a better battery and you know, there eventually they'll make a quiet one and they'll put a gun on top of it, right? So, you know, we're in a world that has enormously dangerous technology coming. We're not even talked about nanotech. How does a publishing platform for anonymous speech intersect with that? Right? Is there anything that a government needs to do with a database that it can't do, but it could do if it had a blockchain? Mhm. And I think the answer is no. Right? I mean, if I'm a government and I'm accumulating huge amounts of information and I want the archive to be secure, I can put it in an enormous warehouse and surround it with ARP guards. It's not really clear that this benefits the state, right? So, I don't think that there's much opportunity for state abuse of blockchain technology any worse than they're using databases right now, which

[35:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvEGTh9HKUU&t=2104s) is bad and bad enough. The NSA secret blockchain project, I I don't find this immediately disturbing. Organized crime on the other

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/301-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [301] Ilaria R. and Vinay Gupta discuss the Ethereum Project and theories of political change, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.