# Stablecoins: Just Say No > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [491]. 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, 2025-09-02 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0kKHTTCuQw. Text: automatic captions, mostly corrected - 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): Finance commentary. - 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) - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine) - Dog Atheism: on smart contracts, risk, and value networks (2016): Essay drafted live in public: smart contracts as capitalism's calculus, with richer instruments than cash... (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) - 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: Gold, stablecoins & asset backing (100%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: stablecoins (10 here; 26 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); memecoins (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2025); stablecoin (1 here; 25 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); real estate (1 here; 106 sources in all, earliest dated 2013, 2 undated) - The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): memecoins - Importance: core-text score 0.11 (1.00 is the top), number 514 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - On the same works, just before: [505] [The State is Not Our Master: Friendly American... (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/505.md); [502] [What Is Price? (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/502.md); [501] [Crypto is Fiat. The Real Revolution is RWA (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/501.md) - On the same works, just after: [477] [Keeping Your Own Reality Register (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/477.md); [478] [Gold-Backed Alternatives to Stablecoins (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/478.md); [479] [Currency Wars: Stablecoins, T-Bills, CBDCs (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/479.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: Stablecoins: Just Say No, video, 2025-09-02, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0kKHTTCuQw; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [491], https://guptaoption.com/texts/491.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0kKHTTCuQw&t=0s) Uh I'm going to start with the universal reminder. Uh there are no stablecoins. There are only government debt and inflation coins. Right? That's the fundamental problem. The entire point of Bitcoin was that it took the issuance of currency out of the hands of government and gave it to the people. Um stablecoins were not stable. Dollar has lost what 99.9% of its purchasing power in the last 50 years. The government was in an emergency on debt when Donald Trump got elected and promised a bill a trillion dollars a year of spending cuts of which nothing has been accomplished and they just put another what was it 5 trillion on the debt ceiling. Every single dollar denominated coin is the direct expression of that fiscal policy. They're death traps, right? I mean like you would do better going to pump fund than to store a substantial amount of wealth as liquid dollar cash at this juncture because the next thing that happens in most people's imagination I think it's a reasonable bet uh from economists is uh inflation and or hyperinflation things that might change that things like AI breakouts robotics fundamental process efficiency gains uh but you got to understand that the dollar is a product and the product is made by a bunch of unreliable maniacs it would have gotten kicked out kicked out of crypto over disreputable behavior had they done to a token what they've done to the dollar right there are no stablecoins conceptually it's a lie then we get to see BDC's all of the same problems plus surveillance baked in so you know I think of stablecoins as being an absolutely necessary evil but nobody should be in stablecoins more than about oh I don't know 2 and a half seconds right you go from some kind of hard asset gold back token real estate back token token uh through a stablecoin to make a dollar denominated payment. And it's just convenient to have that door denominated stuff tokenized for the time being. Um but we we must never ever ever ever ever confuse crypto with stablecoins. stablecoins are a death trap. They are a fiat booby trap. Uh and you know, yeah, they might have a lot of utility and yeah, it might get a lot of people on chain, but they're not on chain. They're just using it for payments. You know, it's a very delicate area. Um, the other thing I'm going to mention here is the whole thing of the T bills. Um, if your stablecoins are backed by T bills, those T bills are generating yield. So, you give them a dollar, they buy a T bill, they keep the [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0kKHTTCuQw&t=150s) yield on the T bill, and then they give you back your dollar. Uh, but if they have an accounting problem, they keep your money, and you lose all your money. And if they make a lot of money for some reason because they weren't in T bills, they were in some diversified portfolio, you don't get any of the upside on that. So, you know, I I really do think that from every conceptual level, uh, stablecoins are the worst thing in crypto. Um, really really even worse than memecoins, but they are still a necessary evil. You still need them to be able to get crypto connected to the real world, but I don't think anybody should be holding value in them. Get in, do the trade, get out again. What you get out to, I think gold back tokens have an enormous amount of potential, particularly because they're going to be issued in a decentralized way. Um but yeah, I mean stablecoins just say no. --- End of [491] Stablecoins: Just Say No. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [477](https://guptaoption.com/texts/477.md) Keeping Your Own Reality Register (2025); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.