# The Forgotten Crypto Futures of the 1990s > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [437]. 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, 2025-11-27 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zOCyz3tfa4. 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): Ledger history. - Career works it belongs to: - 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) - 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... (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: Ethereum — launch, release process & programmable blockchains (100%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: digital identity (3 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Ian Grigg (1 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); science fiction (1 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2011) - Importance: core-text score 0.15 (1.00 is the top), number 419 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - On the same works, just before: [439] [Merging DeFi and TradFi (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/439.md); [440] [The Chicken-Head Model of Stablecoin Economics (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/440.md); [438] [Universal Asset Liquidity (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/438.md) - On the same works, just after: [431] [The Asset Of The Future: Gold, Bitcoin, Real Estate (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/431.md); [220] [OpenExO OS Pilot (2026)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/220.md); [427] ['Code Is Law' vs The Nation State (2026)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/427.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: The Forgotten Crypto Futures of the 1990s, video, 2025-11-27, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zOCyz3tfa4; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [437], https://guptaoption.com/texts/437.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zOCyz3tfa4&t=0s) It's weird, isn't it? Like in those days, all the storytelling that people did about what the crypto future was going to be like, and it just sounded like science fiction. >> Yeah. >> And then it arrives and it just sounds like bureaucracy. There are a lot of folks around, mostly in their 50s and 60s and occasionally 70s that were working on crypto from the early 1990s, you know, and I was just a monkey in those days, right? I was just some kid, you know, working on somebody else's project who was very interested in the future. I wasn't really building things in those days. I was I was kind of in the market for but I was not uh I wasn't leading something, right? Um but the people that were you talk to guys like Ian Grigg or um uh you know the the Plato Protocols guy, what's his name? Nick Sabo, any of those guys. And you know, their perspective on this thing is still five or 10 years ahead of all the people that came into the field after Bitcoin. You know, I kind of feel like Bitcoin, there are a whole generation of people. Yeah, you're nodding along here, right? There are a whole generation of people for whom the history starts with Bitcoin and all of the other branches and all the other strands and all of the other kind of creativity and purpose that preceded Bitcoin, they can't see because they can only see everything that came out downstream of Bitcoin. And this is why things like digital identity are not strongly represented in the blockchain space because all the heavy work on digital identity predates Bitcoin. it wasn't folded into Bitcoin and as far as they're concerned it never existed and they're reinventing all of it. Um, so this thing of, you know, just you have a world of things that happened in the '9s that are hugely important and the '90s guys are still comprehensively ahead of the field because Bitcoin formed this very very tight intellectual bottleneck and if it wasn't in the Bitcoin white paper, everybody's starting from scratch at that point, the younger people, and they're starting as if it was year zero. And I think that that has caused us a lot of problems in the field because it means that we don't understand arbitration. We don't understand contract formation. We don't understand digital identity. Um, a lot of the things about the difference between privacy and secrecy that were worked out have been kind of lost in the conversation and so on and hence forth. So, I'm going to I'm going to put a big thumbs up plus one for the past. --- End of [437] The Forgotten Crypto Futures of the 1990s. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [431](https://guptaoption.com/texts/431.md) The Asset Of The Future: Gold, Bitcoin, Real Estate (2025); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.