# Vinay Gupta (@leashless) of Hexayurt Project at the Bitcoin Expo, London, November 2013

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [317]. 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, 2013-12-01 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-7JIQKbm5U. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Early link from ledgers to identity, property and housing outside failed states.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Governing Bitcoin: what the future holds for our favourite currency (2013): Bitcoin Expo London talk, November 2013: how bitcoin is governed, its competitors and its resilience to...
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine)
  - Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and Maximizing Global Minimalism (2014): Talk at Electromagnetic Field 2014: the Hexayurt as engineering outside the market, for the three billion... (suggested by machine)
  - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - 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)
  - 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 (36%); Burning Man shelter building (18%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: nanomaterials (2 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); non-state structures (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); great power (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Swarm (2 here; 29 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); life extension (1 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); open hardware (1 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); standards (3 here; 87 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); skills (1 here; 67 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated); Hexayurt Project (1 here; 70 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 4 undated); Burning Man (1 here; 90 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): nanomaterials; non-state structures
- Importance: core-text score 0.46 (1.00 is the top), number 121 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [80] [Governing Bitcoin: what the future holds for our... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/80.md): same career work: Governing Bitcoin: what the future holds for our favourite currency
  - [742] [Vinay Gupta - Bitcoin Will Die | London Real (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/742.md): same career work: Governing Bitcoin: what the future holds for our favourite currency
- On the same works, just before: [388] Big Picture Days Hangout 4 (2013); [387] Limewharf #STACKTIVISM #BIGPIX Stream 1 (2013); [319] [A sleepless night trying to find words (2013)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/319.md)
- On the same works, just after: [161] [Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and Maximizing... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/161.md); [162] [media ccc de v emf2014 144 hexayurts distributed... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/162.md); [697] [Vinay Gupta - Resilience Guru - TRAILER | London Real (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/697.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 (@leashless) of Hexayurt Project at the Bitcoin Expo, London, November 2013, video, 2013-12-01, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-7JIQKbm5U; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [317], https://guptaoption.com/texts/317.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-7JIQKbm5U&t=0s) that's by the time you're 50 if you're 40 now that's by the time you're 70 it's the kind of horizon over which people plan their financial Futures it's the kind of horizon over which you might get something like a mortgage so let me give you an example of something which is changing in a semi-predictable way right now which is the price of solar panels solar panels have fallen in price by 7% a year every year for the last 40 years so on the order of every decade the price of Solar paddles half 30 years out you can rationally expect the price of solar panels to be less than atten of what it is now and as a result the entire Global energy landscape will change energy relates to every single economic process we have it gets deep inside of the structure of things like Bitcoin because of the ratio of costs it is an absolutely ubiquitous part of human life so when you hear people talking about 10 15 20 year projections forward um that rning yeah great when you hear people talking about 20 20 30 year projections forward and they don't talk about the exponential fall in Energy prices they're living in a fantasy W there's just no such place um let me show you a thing right so the yellow cable that I have around my keys is a material called Spectra everybody see that so Spectra is a nanomaterial the breaking strain of that piece of string is is in excess of 400 kg right and sometimes I demonstrate this by having people try and pull on it in teams four or five people on each side holding a piece of wood tied to the Spectra the stuff will cut into the wood half an inch and it's 40 PM met on Amazon it's just dirt cheap and it's made freaking polyproline right long chain carbon atoms sheath in hydrogen actually aligned with the direction of your forces so you look out 30 years this stuff is going to be everywhere they're spinning it into clothes Levis make jeans which are laced through the Spectra today you can buy them for about 80 quid a pair so you go forward 10 years ous use of nanomaterials in clothing ous use some nanomaterials in construction you go forward 20 years you begin to see an environment where solar power is substantially cheaper than any other kind of power available you go forward 30 years nanotechnology biotechnology replicator engineering likely to be routine parts life now if

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-7JIQKbm5U&t=150s) you are a big player if you are a hedge fund manager if you are a regulator if you are the state you're responsible for making plans 30 years forward if you're an individual and you're looking at this kind of world where you're trying to plan your future you're responsible for thinking 30 years forward and into this context you then Place Bitcoin Bitcoin

[2:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-7JIQKbm5U&t=170s) is a ripple on an incredibly rapidly accelerating front with technological change right it's not the final solution it's going to have successors the successors will solve other problems it might become a standard that lives a really long time like the internet or web will or it might roll over extremely quickly there's no way to know but this is what we mean when we start talking about the future it's not 2 years out it's not 5 years out it's 15 20 30 years forward you have to be thinking so let's assume that Bitcoin continues to adopt because it builds a governance structure that allows it to continue to change relative to the challenges it faces that means that you continue to modify the standards it means that you continue to modify the code base it means that you try and not break the system of value that you've created because that would be the equivalent of a violent revolution because people's property rights would get broken inside of that structure the only way that you survive into the future is by constant adaptation to the circumstances if you don't adapt you don't get to be part in the future and we know that even theoretically stable standards like Visa are constantly mutating to handle the evolutionary environment which they embed so in the process of that adaptation the primary reason for adapting is conflicts that you might lose conflict number one Regulators conflict number two competitors conflict number three traditional whole stores of value which refuse to cooperate with the Bitcoin system for example you wind up in WS which will not allow you to buy by Landing Bitcoin there could be all kinds of structures which come into play to prevent Bitcoin moving forward and it's the ability to adapt to that unrush of change that defines whether or not to survive right now Bitcoin is in a position where its mechanisms for adaptation are vastly weaker than its adoption curve far more people are coming on board with far more intensity and far more interest and far more money than the governance structures which manage the standards and if you centralize the governance structures you're going to get D like so how do you decide how to move forward in a complex environment given how difficult the structures are to navigate for above ground fully visible ordinary institutions given that the time that you typically spend in the Fortune 1,000 is only 7

[5:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-7JIQKbm5U&t=320s) years R companies rise and they fall again how do you build the Adaptive capacity into the governance structures around Bitcoin such that it has a long-term future the environment is complex we're going through a period of unprecedented discontinuous change through that you have to take this enormous pool of value where we up to now 12 or 15 billion at spot right larger than many large corporations larger than many countries how do you steer that given that it's by naturey Central and I don't have an answer for that but I know that it's absolutely critical that the Bitcoin community begins to talk about governance and begins to talk about risk management in a completely proactive way because the first time you hit a serious challenge if the system come up turn relatively quickly to adopt you're going to get creamed in the same way the eagle survival means adaptation and adaptation means governance capacity so um other targets that might

[6:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-7JIQKbm5U&t=382s) come up wealth transfer for the first time in my life the people that I know that are doing IAL politics are rich that has never happened before whether it was the anarchists whether it was the greens whether it was the left even the Libertarians for the very most part were dirt poor right you step outside of the ordinary political economy in your values and you become rapidly unemployable and we all know this so for the first time I have seen an actual economic model for people to consider themselves to be activists which is building out an alternative economy um in the 1960s one of the most uh preent criticisms of the new le the Revolutionary movement in America was that they did not have an economic model they put all of their energy into resisting the state and as a result all they got was beaten up and at the end of it they had no new institutions the need to build alternative institutions is always seen as a core part of the Revolutionary and the radical agenda and Bitcoin is by far the most effective alternative institution in terms of feeding the people building that has ever come out with an alternative political structure possibly since the invention of Communism right state communism so what we have is a genuine breakthrough in the core structures yeah I'm trying otherwise but the problem is we get the booms cuz they don't have a pop filter so to be quiet you wind up guys people are having a hard time hearing me can you hush in the back so sh thanks guys sorry about that so sorry you were having a hard time hearing so what you have is the first time that an organizational structure has emerged which is capable of feeding the people that are activists within it what we have is an alternative institution which is making the people that are actors within it wealthy and that has never happened before the last time that happened was state communism where they make made the Communists Wealthy by stealing other people's Land by stealing their industrial uh produ right steal their productive capacity so we're now in a position where we have an alternative institution which is successful at feeding the people that are working for it and that has never happened in 100 years it potentially has enormous legs but what it means is the holders of wealth in other forms and the members of other participatory structures which have that property for example conventional State capitalism

[8:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-7JIQKbm5U&t=532s) are going to become increasingly threatened as Bitcoin scales right because you have an alternative institution which is completely continuous with the goals of the dim and distant now forgotten 60s the radical decentralization the ability to build non-state structures that work you'll get identity management you'll get property Rights Management you'll get auction houses you'll get all the rest of these kind of structures escrow is already here as that stuff builds out what you have is a direct competitor with the state which was always the an archal capitalist dream it was always the libertarian dream but can you hold it right as uh Ben Frankin said what do they have they have a republic if they can hold it and the ability to hold it comes back to the ability to govern it's the ability to change and it's the ability to adapt even if the governance is completely decentralized swarm Behavior it's still governance because the Swarm act as a whole and this is the critical challenge every time you succeed you come into a new type of people that are threatened by your existence with a new set of techniques for shutting you down so as you begin to be a substantial alternate way of storing value all of the other stores of value become threatened all the people that are storing Assets in those stores of value become threatened and this is how the pressure piles

[10:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-7JIQKbm5U&t=617s) on so um final piece of this right with power comes responsibility so as Bitcoin begins to put a real pressure on the world and on the way that things operate com with the responsibility of solving some of the problems other actors are failing to solve the two big problems I worry about most are climate and the associated impacts that are you know in the humanitarian sphere and nanotechnology and biotechnology risk manager which is greay go it's designer ples it's basement bioweapons it's all of that stuff so what I really want to see emerge from this new thing which is happening is not just the counter economics counter economics is lovely it's a great way for a limited number for people to go out there and do their thing great fantastic counter economics will not do anything at all to stop 6° of planetary warming and a drop of 2 billion people in the human population because agriculture collapses so with great power C was great responsibility how is this community of people that have built the first really successful alternative political institution since communism actually going to find a way of making sure the planet that they're living on continues to exist long enough enough for them to enjoy their success right when we start talking about political Consciousness the state is just the last institution that had responsibility for solving the real problem as you begin to out compete the state in certain areas you become responsible for solving the real problem it's not just currency it's not just Freedom it's survival and until we begin to build a political rhetoric that absolutely acknowledges the real states of the human game that we play way the Tactical and even the Strategic success of Bitcoin will not turn into a better chance for the human race to survive and these risks are real and acute we must not get into a position where we have a tactical or a strategic success that fails to solve the real political problems we face so thank you

[12:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-7JIQKbm5U&t=757s) I just realized I forgot to explain the slide so my main project is a thing called the Hexayurt Project which is an open Hardware housing system uh in a nutshell those the walls of these shelters are whole sheets of 4x8 or 1.2x 2.4 me material and the roof pieces are half sheets so you can just take this material off a truck in huge quantities cut half of it in half screw or glue or tape it together and produce emergency housing and these pictures were taken at Burning Man and last year they built about, 1500 units so this is kind of all the way at the other end of mule's hierarchy from Bitcoin this is the basic Mechanics for keeping people alive inside of a li complex and there's a whole bunch of other work hexayurt yur sixs sited yur uh if I can get adjust the slide other side of the slide can you move that over so we can see the big dome I don't think there was there anyway so do we have time for questions okay right questions we on the same page Jack Fresco same page Jack Jack Fresco I don't know Jack Fresco so I don't know great okay uh other questions given that I don't know who Jack FR is helping yeah can you talk us through your vision your he other than sure so the question is can I talk about the vision for the hexayurts other than a burning mine very basically we've got to provide a decent standard of living for an additional 4 to 6 billion people over the next 50 years or we're going to have endless resource Wars so the long-term strategy for the hexayurt is to take two Thin sheets of aluminium like you use for a Coke can and then a honeycomb of cardboard in between and fill the Gap with shredded newspaper machine seal the edges and that gets you a 3 Kg insulated panel which costs on the order of €10 and as long as you don't pierce the surface with a nail the thing will last for only over 50 to 100 years before the glue fails when that happens rip the aluminium off and recycle it and mulch the cardboard what that means is we can do super lightweight insulated housing out of enormously available materials for the entire world inside a free market context very very simple H and you could go up to these kind of does here that's

[15:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-7JIQKbm5U&t=907s) all made with the same components as the little hexayurts you just build a slightly larger version uh out of basically four of the roofs of the smaller units connected so that gets you housing solar panels get you energy uh Dirt Cheap telecommunications devices are already ubiquitous no problem there there are equivalent technological breakthroughs for water for cooking for sanitation for agriculture uh Safe Water trust one acre fund um the bolite stove guys or any of the wood gasification stoves what you wind up with is a system where you can buy everything that it takes for a family to live relatively well in a rural environment for on the order of $300 which is roughly equivalent to one year's income and that system if you implement it properly will give people essentially first world LIF span because they will stop getting the vast majority of diseases that are waterbor because they'll have some access to basic medical information because they'll have decent infrastructure for the basics of saying alive and the long-term vision is to create a safety buffer for the probability that we're going to continue to have a power law distribution in well so we've got to figure out what we're going to do with the bottom half of humanity they're not going to be able to get a foot on the ladder they are not going to the Stars they are not going to get life extension treatment so how exactly we going to provide a decent standard of living for everybody without having to implement Global socialism and the answer is you make the essentials that people need to stay alive so cheap that everybody can afford them at which point you don't need to regulate how these things are provided anymore they become as ubiquitous as pencils um do answer your question oh and I should say that almost all of those Technologies are fully public domain or the patents expired decades ago you know this is all weer stuff we're not going to go back into a pap this okay uh any more questions can you can you just share your uh how get hold of you oh yeah so uh basically just find the hex Vin GTA at the hex project just you know look on the website there's my Twitter and there's my email and all the rest of that stuff uh easy to find engine water powerered engine I've killed the who invented never seen anything like that actually function so cool thank you um okay

[17:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-7JIQKbm5U&t=1061s) yeah self education self regulation okay hard question and two minutes okay self-regulation is what is your thoughts on Co validation what are your thoughts on Co validation coin validation God talking about a hard question okay so nobody really has done the Deep political philosophical work on bitcoin right everybody kind of thinks that it slots neatly into an Narco capitalist or libertarian framework but actually it's much more complicated than that because there is no strong property right for management of the system as a whole and this is an absolutely critical thing right if Bitcoin was incorporated as a conventional company there would be a property right that was sold and traded for the people that owned that company and they would be responsible for making policy decisions and you'd be operating inside of an amap or a Libertarian framework the problem is that a top level Bitcoin is an anarchy so you have a bunch of people who are working in an anarco capitalist trading structure that is administered as a non-state Anarchy and the impedance mismatch between anarco capitalism State style property rights and the actual anarchic nature of the Bitcoin Enterprise is shockingly undiscussed so what comes out with that is every time you get a question like coin validation and uh you know the questions about what constitutes a failure of the system that requires Central intervention to repair like the blockchain fork you wind up with a whole bunch of people talking completely different languages about how to solve the problem because without a solid property right at the beginning without an owner it just doesn't work inside of a standard and Arch capitalist model and very few of the people involved in Bitcoin have any of the necessary skills through governance in an anarchy right Libertarians do not understand how governance Works in Anarchy it's a completely different model of how you get things done so the B question about Bitcoin is libertarian or anarchist because anarco capitalism is really just uh you know a subset of libertarianism or the other way around it doesn't matter it is not the same as non-state Anarchy it is not the same as left Anarchy it's certainly not the same as class rough bar be Dam right so you get into a position where the community as a whole has to decide whether or not they're going to be Libertarians and establish a strong property right controls Bitcoin

[20:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-7JIQKbm5U&t=1211s) or whether they're going to be anarchists and they're actually going to learn how to get good at decentralized governance right my assertion is this if you go down the libertarian route you're going to wind up owned by Morgan Stanley right eventually so much of the Bitcoin will be owned by hedge funds that they will wind up as the def facto Masters of the Universe and your system will wind up as just another commodity and then there'll be a sea of alt coins that just continue to foam in the background and they're worth about 50 Quid each right or you can go down the anarchist route grab the system by its hair and figure out how to do governance and I think and I hate to say this but I think you're either going to wind up having to have an identity architecture so you can do representative governance or you're going to have to say 1 coin1 vote but if you go down the route going one coin one vote which is cryptographically pretty easy to manage you're going to have huge problems if the hedge funds decide that they like Bitcoin so this is really the challenge I don't have any answers but I think that people really seriously need to up the discussion about Bitcoin uh in terms of political philosophy really really several times very quickly because right now you have a runaway success which has greatly exceeded the capacity of people using it to govern and if you don't solve that problem pretty damn quick failures of governance are going to go end Utopia so you know now is the time to go back to the anarchists Herbert snorrison in Iceland anarchism. there go Herbert snorrison H you know poke him until he tells you what to do it's very smart thank you that is amazing you haven't heard of that ladies and gentlemen bit quiet Venus Project oh okay if they said Venus Project I would know my name I just didn't remember the name

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End of [317] Vinay Gupta (@leashless) of Hexayurt Project at the Bitcoin Expo, London, November 2013. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [161](https://guptaoption.com/texts/161.md) Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and Maximizing... (2014); the most closely related, [80](https://guptaoption.com/texts/80.md) Governing Bitcoin: what the future holds for our... (2014); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.