# Testing "Ethereum for Web Developers" with a few friends > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [309]. 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, 2015-01-25 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHByEUh7NL4. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015), before the law step (Mattereum, 2017). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Ledger-layer explainer. - Career works it belongs to: - 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) - People's Cloud architecture and futures in 1000 words (2013): Blog essay: the data center is doomed, its efficiency is bought with centralization and monitoring, 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) - 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: Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (12%); contracts / companies / value (12%); Ethereum — launch, release process & programmable blockchains (12%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: IoT (2 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Mist (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); Kit (1 here; 29 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); smart contracts (1 here; 110 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); contracts (1 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated) - The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): Mist - Importance: core-text score 0.22 (1.00 is the top), number 347 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [791] [COP26 Event: Green Blockchain, Green Economy (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/791.md): close in content (cosine 0.93) - [864] [Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin with Vinay Gupta Virtual... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/864.md): close in content (cosine 0.93) - On the same works, just before: [119] [Consensys - Building the Era of Decentralized Finance (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/119.md); [132] [Ethereum - The complete guide from ethereum.org (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/132.md); [244] [Coase’s Blockchain: Can Equity Crowdfunding Accelerate... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/244.md) - On the same works, just after: [308] [financial services club 27 January 2015 - What is Money?... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/308.md); [303] [How To Sell Ideas from (from Ethereum DEVCON Berlin) (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/303.md); [113] [The Ethereum Launch Process | Ethereum Foundation Blog (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/113.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: Testing "Ethereum for Web Developers" with a few friends, video, 2015-01-25, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHByEUh7NL4; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [309], https://guptaoption.com/texts/309.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHByEUh7NL4&t=0s) running yeah keep keep an eye on this the secret by sat to proceed I am not now nor have I ever been satosi we believe you thanks um okay any camera right ethereum for normal [0:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHByEUh7NL4&t=28s) people right the problem that we have explaining ethereum is that everybody starts with Bitcoin and if you start with Bitcoin explaining ethereum is a completely impossible and fos task because it just doesn't make any sense because Bitcoin itself is inherently extraordinarily complicated and annoying to explain so if you're for normal people on the front end you've got a thing called Miss which is essentially a web browser there is no magic to it it's a web browser but it connects to something which is not the the web it's the ethereum network so instead of web connect to a different network but it's fundamentally a web browser with man security there's a set of client libraries or command line interface which is managing all the necessary crypto to connect to that Network and the sum total of all the nodes running that software is essentially the network which is basically a mesh database big decentralized and all the rest of the stuff no this is the in in part the explanation what the meas database gives you is a series of time stamp blocks so block number one block number two block number three block number four time stamps blocks each block contains a series of statements and the um the users of this kind of browser interface all have a pair of cryptographic keys Joe key PA aage user with those keys they digitally sign a statement put it into a transaction the transactions are recorded in this train of blocks and that's all blockchain is it's a series of digitally signed statements that are sequenced into batches and those batches form a coherent history right so it's essentially just a file that you can only write to the end of and there's a [2:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHByEUh7NL4&t=137s) bunch of magic now here's the clever part of the new explanation all of the magic happens here so the past is completely and indelibly fixed and there's no controversy about the past once it's say an hour old or in ethereum's case 6 minutes old all of that stuff is completely fixed however from the present uh you know from say the present back for half an hour say there's this kind of nebulous period where we're not exactly sure how history will be written up so you have a present which is kind of a sliding window and at the end of that sliding window the present becomes the past and the past is fixed but this is kind of squishy um all of the complexity is right here what's essentially the head of a loom if you're leaving right you've got all this warp in this W and then you've got a process which weaves that together into the fabric of History once it's in the fabric it's immutable now here is the great Insight that I am incredibly proud of we don't have to care how that works we just need to know that it does so most of the time when people are explaining Bitcoin or ethereum or all any the rest of that stuff they spend all of their time explaining just that print head and how it weaves together the present into the past but actually we don't care right if you were working with an SQL right begin transaction throw a bunch of stuff commit right and what happens between our transaction going into the database and the acknowledgement coming back with the commit we don't actually care right unless you're into database optimization Theory you just have no interest about step and every time we explain this stuff all we ever do is that part so you [4:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHByEUh7NL4&t=244s) know the traditional lamp stack right so Linux uh Apache MySQL and PHP python parl Etc and then on the front end of that you've got browser a there's your l if you're doing this stuff instead of in L you're doing ethereum Linux is Linux or Windows or Mac right we don't really care what you're running on because it's crossplatform instead of Apache we've got the lowlevel CLI stuff right you know there's a there's essentially a server architecture that's all nicely decentralized instead of mysq well we've got the blockchain database right instead of PHP par python Etc we've got solidity uh or l or any of the other languages that run in the ethereum environment and then instead of Milla we put missed so basically when people say Ethereum what they're talking about is that technology stack and that technology stack is immediately recognizable to web developers we just haven't been explaining it that way because ethereum has been far too focused on explaining what ethereum is bit people rather than explaining what if you're aware people right you you have the client you run the client through M you upload content into the blockchain other people access the content the content can't be edited because it's been stuck in this perent form it's basically just a decentralized web stack with lots of added cryptography and finance and immutable scripting and smart contracts and bunch of other stuff but in terms of explaining the damn thing that's how we to right uh should I turn the camera off or does anybody you want to ask a question on the camera who missed um so [6:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHByEUh7NL4&t=363s) ethereum crowdfunded 30,000 Bitcoins which at the time was worth $8 million mist is seemed to remember based on web kit uh might be wrong about that but it's either webkit or Geck or one of these things but it's you know it's based on stand technology plus a whole bunch of additional stuff as well yeah so in that sort of context the other bit this is you know IBM is for to theorum into thing called adapt so their notion is that your Internet thingss devices right if you've got a system where you've got your kind of iot device here and it has to connect to a server um eventually somebody will turn off that server because the device is now Obsolete and then your toaster will stop working so IBM's notion is that you have uh the toaster connect to a blockchain that's being used for lots of other things at the same time and at that point you don't have to worry because the blockchain is essentially permanent it's as permanent as the store value which is in it so you wind up with iot devices which are norl toal Ser which makable I understand that part of adept yeah it's it's it's exciting and um you know fantastic but what's the incentive for people to sit there and maintain a permanent block for the benefit of a toaster you don't the blockchain has been used for 58 other thousand things so so you're putting a whole lot of stuff into the same Pro yeah absolutely I mean this is availability is issue well I mean people keep worrying about scalability and fussing about scalability blockchains well hard drives report doubling in volume every year and a half you can now buy 6 terab hard drive which will fit in your PC laptop hard drives currently max out around 2 tbte entire transaction history for Bitcoin is 21 gig maybe it's just you know I'm not the limits to the blockchain are in different places there's space yeah and there's the band width across the net you've got to send all these signals across the net to keep it going yeah absolutely it's now even now it's moved to the point where they're now talking about thousands of super nodes and everybody else is listening to the supern so it's no longer the distributed nvada that we were talking about right [8:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHByEUh7NL4&t=513s) so these guys are going to require an incentive at some point if they end up powering the world's toasters and frankly Beyond toast well okay so nature [8:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHByEUh7NL4&t=526s) of incentivization the Ethereum model is that people pay to store stuff in the blockchain so if I store something into the blockchain I have to keep paying to keep it there no there's no way to get it back out again but people make payments when it's being written in and then what you have is a sort notion of a sliding window of stuff which is currently active and is easy to access yeah and increasingly old stuff is increasingly rare potentially but I mean fundamentally there is no perfect answer to this so you're saying that people will keep um the full archive a few people will keep the full archive and most people will keep the current archive well I I think that the full archive is going to turn out to be in practice and expansive M right even if the full archive is 4 terabytes right which would be you know an order of 200 2,000 rather more than right yeah at the end of the day it's four freaking terabytes we've already crossed that bar close to close to $100 to store yeah so if the close to storing the entire transactional history is $100 anything that's size of a movie is probably and that's a thousand movies it's size movies right big deal I I don't see that as being an issue people are very very worried about scale ability and it becomes an issue think of like Visa right so if you're doing oltp uh online transaction processing so the server can never come down because if it does you can no longer pay for things if you're doing L ltp the volume is terabytes right if you're rendering highr movies you know so you're you know like DreamWorks or um shre Pixar right your DreamWorks are Pixar you're handling quantities of data in a commercial context which are tens of thousands of times the size of any manable blockchain right right um it's just not that horrible once you begin to think of like $100 million movie budget five million of BU is on servers and you're shipping it over light from one continent to another so different teams can work on yeah yeah so you know it's not as if this level of scalability is like NASA technology it's at worst Pixar technology and if you're talking about something which genuinely is powering you know has presence on 20% of the world's cell phones I don't think paying for Pixar technology is going to turn out to be an outlandish Prospect right um to turn the camera [11:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHByEUh7NL4&t=676s) up you are not allow to turn camera where is the button --- End of [309] Testing "Ethereum for Web Developers" with a few friends. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [308](https://guptaoption.com/texts/308.md) financial services club 27 January 2015 - What is Money?... (2015); the most closely related, [791](https://guptaoption.com/texts/791.md) COP26 Event: Green Blockchain, Green Economy (2021); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.