# Vinay Gupta - Protecting History (blockchains) Maker Faire Newcastle 2015 > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [302]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: video, 2015-04-27 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysBzv6n9aVo. Text: automatic captions, uncorrected - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015), before the law step (Mattereum, 2017). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Ledger as protected shared memory. - Career works it belongs to: - In a Page (2010): A series of one-page papers, mostly from spring 2010, each putting one argument on a single sheet. (suggested by machine) - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (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) - 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) - 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) - 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) - Topics: Nuclear war & defence strategy — nuclear, space, military (20%); Cryptography, encryption & cypherpunks (20%); Open government & anti-corruption (10%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: cryptoeconomics (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); digital signatures (1 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); platforms (1 here; 76 sources in all, earliest dated 2008) - Importance: core-text score 0.26 (1.00 is the top), number 296 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [864] [Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin with Vinay Gupta Virtual... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/864.md): close in content (cosine 0.93) - [626] Vishal Gupta - Identity - Internet of Agreements (2018): close in content (cosine 0.92) - On the same works, just before: [308] [financial services club 27 January 2015 - What is Money?... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/308.md); [305] [ChangeHow - rough camera video of Vinay Gupta's talk on... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/305.md); [756] [Change:HOW #17 Vinay Gupta (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/756.md) - On the same works, just after: [234] [zenpundit.com » Blog Archive » WARLORDS, INC BOOK LAUNCH!!! (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/234.md); [115] [Warlords, Inc.: Black Markets, Broken States, and the... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/115.md); [301] [Ilaria R. and Vinay Gupta discuss the Ethereum Project... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/301.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 - Protecting History (blockchains) Maker Faire Newcastle 2015, video, 2015-04-27, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysBzv6n9aVo; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [302], https://guptaoption.com/texts/302.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysBzv6n9aVo&t=0s) this is quite funny because what i'm actually going to be talking about is the processes by which we record history and uh part of that is obviously capturing the drama stuff in the first place um this is going to be a bit of a technical presentation and there's a couple of different ways of describing the things i'm going to talk about the approach that i'm taking today is quite abstract so rather than kind of my new explanation of how things work i'm going to talk through these things that can have political structural kind of a while and then from there if people have more technical questions you can ask them at the end so what i'm going to be talking about is basically the extended case of the gold bitcoin can you raise your hands if you've heard of bitcoin okay anybody know how it works okay [1:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysBzv6n9aVo&t=60s) so bitcoin is a bearer of a thing to explain it's one of the most complicated bits of software ever written it's not necessarily particularly large it's not a huge sprawling piece of are a couple hundred thousand lines of colors but it includes more or less the total history of cryptography as a single package with a bunch of new ideas extended to new fields called something like cryptoeconomics if that's today that we are eventually settled and it's lots and lots and lots and lots of lots of different moving parts all of which are conceptually quite different connected together until you produce this marvelous mechanical invention of the blockchain now what a blockchain is is it's a structured file it's just like any other file on your computer you know and it's divided up into sections this is the 10 am section this is the 10 10 section this is the 10 20 section this is the 10 30 section and in each section you've got a bunch of transactions which essentially payments both gives andy 20 quid and he gives john 30 quid and john gives fred 50 quid and all those transactions are structured in time and somebody makes it random decision about how they're going to order those transactions in the block lots of people look at what the agreement's okay everybody's signed off and those are the transactions for 10 30. now we're going to go for new transactions for 1040. conceptually that all counts pretty simple now you have to imagine a bunch of people doing that in our old west saloon pointing guns at each other for everybody accuses everybody else of lion and we're talking about four billion dollars worth of gold sitting in a wagon outside it's the security that makes it difficult [2:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysBzv6n9aVo&t=167s) now what i'm going to be positive is that the security mechanisms are currently protecting four billion dollars worth of volume of bitcoin could be extended in some fairly straightforward ways to protect our history and you might say well nobody's attacking our history now is that true can anybody think of some history that's actively under attack a version of the past that people are trying to make go away holocaust yeah whole coast is a good one uh has anybody heard of the armenian genocide now the armenian genocide is a substantial part of the you know it's a fraction of the size of the holocaust but it's almost been washed out of history right you've got some vague awareness but nobody can immediately conjure up an image of the armenian genocide you said aren't going to interest you can't immediately identify how many people were killed because it's just faded out it's a few decades earlier than the holocaust the armenians have been much less effective at preserving the memory of it and the result is that you have the first you know the first real genocide of the age of genocides is almost washed out of history and there's a ton of suppression of that history even today particularly by the turkish government because nobody really wants to know what happened so the notion that history is under continuous attack is quite an important conceptual model because it's not something that you see in your generation i used to work without he was a vietnam veteran and he turned to me on dancing but he just realized something it's longer since vietnam was that vietnam was from world war ii and when i went to vietnam vietnam was ancient history and sorry world war ii was ancient history nobody remembered nobody cared it was the previous generations war is that what vietnam is for you and i'm like i'm a european right if vietnam was even more listed on that gives you this funny look and then he shows me his front teeth which had been knocked out when he fell over uh a broom in a warehouse uh in vietnam uh because he was more airfray and it's like you know every day they're there and they've been replaced so this notion that history is constantly washing away anybody makes this notion of deliberate attempts to erase history all the more powerful and more dangerous because if the history is naturally washing away because of the full time of the natural forgetfulness of human race when people add additional pressure to that to try and get rid of something the tendency is [5:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysBzv6n9aVo&t=317s) for it to vanish does everybody know the image of tank man from china tiananmen square there's a row of tanks and there's a man holding almost like two tesco bags standing in front of the tanks and there's video where they try and turn the tank around and he goes and scoots first to get in the way about the other side and for us right if you remember tiananmen square this is the iconic image of tiananmen square in china the image is unknown and i was really recently about chinese graduate students when they come to america to you know do their phds he said in the first month we walked through wikipedia reading chinese history and this raises the question well google censors certain web pages in china but not first google ebay censor certain products in germany but not others right what if you start censoring wikipedia to make it regionally sensitive so that the government of the local area will give you a hard time about actually having wikipedia and down that path you begin the process of censoring the present censoring the documents in a way that completely reshapes each generation's understanding of the past you start to see how this could become throne so that's essentially what we're [6:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysBzv6n9aVo&t=394s) going to talk about more importantly but i'll give you a rough preview of where we're going because it's quite funny territory so the risk is that in the present you can change the documentation of the past in a way that makes the past change to all intents and purposes once you've made that alteration if all the documentation present is consistent whatever the actual paths was it's now lost the particular of the living memory right we do it in the first cut in the process of making views right whatever the cameras choose not to look at whatever is not broadcast doesn't exist it doesn't become part of the stream of images which constitute the first half culture but particularly the age of the camera of whom there's always a second opinion there's always a different perspective there's always a new way of seeing them so this is not quite the issue if it was before we had camera phones everywhere and you're seeing this happening right now in america with uh lots and lots of people filming the police doing blatantly illegal things then asking why they were arrested um this is george orwell's famous phrase right he who controls the past controls the future he who controls the president controls the past and this is as far as i can tell an absolute truth the past doesn't exist except in the present and for example you can think of the taliban and isis going around blowing up all the historical monuments there is raising history as a political act and that's a kind of history that's much harder to protect than digital history but it's also much older some of that stuff's a thousand fifteen hundred years old so what i'm going to talk about is why right once you have this kind of tooling [8:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysBzv6n9aVo&t=503s) it becomes possible to lay down the cultural history of humanity in the same framework which is being used to record all financial transactions and this i think is potentially extremely important and governments are the primary risk for eurasia of history in an intentional way because they're only people who really have the power to do it but the economy is much larger than the state typically the government has somewhere between 10-30 of the employees in society often less uh it's got control between a quarter 20 of that of the gdp can be as low as 15. so the government is actually much slower than the economy as a whole and if you're using the same mechanisms that are being used to manage the economy to also record your history you have a kind of single unified framework for store in the past and if you start with raising history you also start erasing the economy and generally speaking people are very very very reluctant to let people erase for example their property rights registration you know if the government in the process of rewriting the history of manchester also it raises all property ownership and everybody's house suddenly becomes free for grabs generally speaking people will suddenly notice something was wrong in a way which is completely different from a few gradually bleached and passed out of same way this notion that you could have a single mechanism which secures both the economic transactions and the historical structure of a society i think is a new phenomenon it's something that's only become possible because of bitcoin because of blockchains i work with a project called ethereum which is kind of like a programmable version of bitcoin we've obviously got tons of interest in this kind of security of the past and what it all bedrocks on is this idea of decentralizing the truth [10:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysBzv6n9aVo&t=615s) now at the moment the truth is generated in one place one time right you have a camera it's embedded in time and place you take a set of pictures this becomes the truth and there's always the question about what is undocumented what is on the scene but you have this version of the truth and therapies as that truth spreads out it requires more and more credibility and more and more reality because lots and lots of people are paying attention to it they're looking they're listening they are copying so it makes its way you say from a newspaper photographer to a newspaper they print out everybody ends up with a copy if you want to change that piece of past you've got around about 30 000 or 50 000 copies of that physical newspaper the danger is that in 10 or 20 years physical newspapers likely to vanish because everybody will need to use on their kindle or their hologram eyeglasses or whatever it happens to be so now we have this possibility that if you want to change past you get hold of the newspaper image and you photoshop it and you push the updated version to all the devices which are connected so you can have this notion that everything is electronic and the dissemination is instant but the price of that is that the changes leave no footprints so if we photoshop a picture and then push the update perfectly full if the phone silently accepts that change what has happened has been altered it's completely visible and this is why you need this kind of blockchain technology with all of this clever cryptography to produce a fixed static unchanging economic history and you need to use that mechanism to secure the pictures from newspapers you needed to secure the data that's streamed out of tiananmen square during the actual crisis there such that when the time comes you can't simply get back out right the thing about provable agreement is this if we all have copies of a picture and one half of them show one truth and another half of them show another truth it's very hard to say which is the original so on the point of dissemination when the images are going down they all have to be sort of lockstep ascended everybody has to agree we've got the image this is what the image looks like and you can use digital signatures and hashes and things like that to secure those images then if somebody changes it later on the 75 percent of us that have the original version can put our hands up and say uh my software says that's not the original here's what i think is the [12:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysBzv6n9aVo&t=765s) original and you get this kind of democratic shifting where it doesn't really matter what the proposed change is people will generate something because it is a change and even if only a small minority of people are holding the original and vociferously objecting and shifting then you still have these mechanisms that allow you to fight back if i can prove that something was in the new york times from 35 years ago in a way that is cryptographically secure it doesn't matter what the archive says today i still have proof that was issued at the time and these mechanisms are incredibly important because without them how are we to know what the past really said [13:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysBzv6n9aVo&t=809s) and david jersey is kind of involved so one of the problems that we have is that increasingly the truth is copyrighted so when something goes where say a press photographer goes and takes a bunch of pictures or use photographer goes out and a new screen takes a bunch of pictures it's very very common that the original capture is copyrighted it's copyrighted by the person who took pictures they're being paid by a news agency the news agency takes all the originals they then make some edits and release that as their product so one possibility is you get an objection to this kind of looking history in a digital form because the agencies actually own the copyright refuse to allow it to walk into the past i think this is a very dangerous idea we might need to begin to reconsider some of the functions of copyright to make it automatically legal to store an archival copy which is designed to protect the future from manipulation by particularly the state examples of walls are being used this way copyright is certainly an example the really sharp one is until laws against mediocre police and you see this particularly in america but it's also present here but police are often very very unhappy if you videotape them and you need a special legal protection for the ability to monitor police or soldiers if they're operating in your area otherwise you create an environment where the truth is never recorded in the first place so there's nothing to protect we need sort of an evenness of truth if we're going to have a society that has a lot of tv cameras we have cctvs it should be possible to use those to monitor police in exactly the same way it's possible using the monitor ahead the public or terrorists um the notion that we need a uniform law either no observation or complete observation or something in between but that applies equally to all of us is how we make sure that our technological society doesn't in fact become a police state and this is an extremely important notion you have to equalize out the empowerment technology offers people or you wind up more and more and more empowerment and fewer and fewer of your hands and it creates all the same problems that you'd expect from wealth concentration um [15:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysBzv6n9aVo&t=945s) issues are raised from this right what do we do about privacy and the right to be forgotten in a situation where you've got permanent virtual fits now if we have this notion of a you know 10 10 ball chain 10 for department chain you're trying very well and this permanent rolling or 10 minute or six minute or six second you know frozen digital history that we're using to store all of our credit card transactions what do you do when you were a teenager you had some absolutely crazy opinions you published all over the internet now there's no way to get rid of it right now the natural fading out of history will tend to mean that the old platforms were away if it wasn't an archive for work or you take it down it's gone there's still the possibility of the past fading out facebook is very good at this right facebook makes it quite hard to search for things that are a long time ago it sort of presents there's a limited window in the present now of course their actual window is that they store everything but they don't make it easy to get at that past so it creates the illusion of privacy and the illusion provided be forgotten so the stuff that happened at facebook 10 years ago is not sitting there with an accessible url but if we're going to have this illusion of protected history that can't be altered we have to make some decisions about how things are included or not included in that or how we manage our personal rights relative to it because if your uh you know 13 year old poetry is given the same kind of permanence as challenging square has given it could potentially be very embarrassing and we need to think about that but we're going to wind up with the condition that we're beginning to get today in the uk which is the rule of the board where only people that were completely double as teenagers completely down darwin college different penalty risks never made any mistakes can ever be elected highly vulnerable so um that is the basic story uh allowing two other things i think help keepers in perspective so right now there's a ton of interest in the use of drones right they're being used very heavily militarily but also about to start popping that frog --- End of [302] Vinay Gupta - Protecting History (blockchains) Maker Faire Newcastle 2015. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [234](https://guptaoption.com/texts/234.md) zenpundit.com » Blog Archive » WARLORDS, INC BOOK LAUNCH!!! (2015); the most closely related, [864](https://guptaoption.com/texts/864.md) Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin with Vinay Gupta Virtual... (2018); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.