# How Societies Adopt New Technology > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [423]. 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, 2026-04-14 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjh2bL8GJ64. Text: automatic captions, uncorrected - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024), the latest step. - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Technology and society. - Career works it belongs to: - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (suggested by machine) - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine) - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (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) - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (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) - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... (through a work suggested by machine) - Topics: Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (50%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: ledgers (1 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); tokenization (1 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); markets (1 here; 159 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 6 undated) - Importance: core-text score 0.10 (1.00 is the top), number 613 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - On the same works, just before: [428] [24/7 Markets are Inhuman (2026)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/428.md); [429] [The Great Leap Forwards (2026)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/429.md); [430] [The Significance Of US Changes in Crypto Regulation (2026)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/430.md) - On the same works, just after: [682] [Ep. #641 - Vinay Gupta on China, Futurism, Government,... (2026)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/682.md); [840] [Rich data capitalism: economics, environment and governance (2026)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/840.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: How Societies Adopt New Technology, video, 2026-04-14, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjh2bL8GJ64; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [423], https://guptaoption.com/texts/423.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjh2bL8GJ64&t=0s) You know, technological change is a constant and we've got, you know, at this point history year after year after year after year, decade after decade, century after century of struggles between the people that control the system and the people that transform the system and the people that maintain the system. And you know if you're in bank it IT you know you're spending oh you know 10020 $500 million a year maintaining a set of software that goes back to the 1970s in many cases certainly the 1990s all that old cobalt code all that stuff about you know is Y2K going to crash the entire world legacy software problems. So what the blockchain comes along and says is like look how would you like a postle legacy environment. Everybody's identified by crypto keys. Everybody can see everything on a single transparent register. And that makes any kind of property that you can lift onto the register as transparent as housing records and car records and stock ledgers for publicly traded companies. And you know what happens is the system looks at that database technology and just tries to figure out how it's going to protect its margins from this new technology. And if you think of this entirely as a game of how do I protect my margins from this new technology, how do I protect my ability to tax using this new technology? What you sort of get is this notion of a struggle between blocking the technology to the point where you get revolutionary change or rolling forward without any restriction at all at which point the new technology eats the old technology completely and the institutions are nuked. Um that struggle is centuries old. Like the anarchists in Russia thought that the future human freedom was electrical motors because it would allow for agricultural processing in the villages and it would break up the monopolies of things like the grain mills. And that struggle between centralization and decentralization centuries old. So having them adopt these technologies in a way that protects their monopolies does allow the technologies to mature. It does allow the industry to make some money. It does allow us to get things like tokenization of uh reg CF, crowdfunding, this kind of stuff. Secondary markets for equity and startups. You know, there there are an enormous number of benefits from these things. But, you know, and this is very much a question for everybody who's, you know, on the panel. Like does that imply that America is basically going to regulate crypto in its cypher punk forms out of [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjh2bL8GJ64&t=150s) existence and then all that stuff is going to move offshore or do we think that there's going to be some kind of accommodation made for the cypher punk world model within the general American condition? --- End of [423] How Societies Adopt New Technology. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [682](https://guptaoption.com/texts/682.md) Ep. #641 - Vinay Gupta on China, Futurism, Government,... (2026); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.