# Event Spotlight - Talk at LOGIN 2024 - Can regulators and crypto ever get along? Find out! > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [558]. 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, 2024-06-11 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnN8mhd8qtU. Text: automatic captions, partly 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): Places the ledger layer within state regulation. - 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) - Internet of Agreements (2017): Paper at the World Government Summit in Dubai on producing legal agreements at industrial scale. (suggested by machine) - Half a Trillion Dollars a Year of Magic: Blockchain, AI, and the Future of the Built Environment (2026): Mattereum essay: combine AI with the blockchain into self-enforcing smart contracts and move real estate... (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: Ethereum — launch, release process & programmable blockchains (25%); blockchain / global / internet (12%); Crypto history, e-gold & digital money (12%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: trade documents (2 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2024); reputation systems (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); ledgers (3 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); insurance model (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); KYC (2 here; 27 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); open data (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); COVID (1 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Estonia (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); AML (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); legal status (1 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2012) - Importance: core-text score 0.33 (1.00 is the top), number 212 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - On the same works, just before: [561] [How the Blockchain can liberate producers and consumers. (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/561.md); [560] [Roger's Diffusion Curve: A Roadmap for the Ethereum Launch (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/560.md); [559] [Gold RWA arrive onchain! (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/559.md) - On the same works, just after: [557] [The Future of Real Estate RWA (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/557.md); [556] [ETHCC24: 'Selling physical things using NFTs: what we... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/556.md); [555] [Breaking Down Real World Assets: Crypto Daily, with... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/555.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: Event Spotlight - Talk at LOGIN 2024 - Can regulators and crypto ever get along? Find out!, video, 2024-06-11, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnN8mhd8qtU; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [558], https://guptaoption.com/texts/558.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnN8mhd8qtU&t=0s) [Music] okay hi everyone um so what I'm going to be talking about is the long-term stable adoption of crypto uh stable is not a thing you think of as being a term that goes with crypto most Parts crypto is very volatile it's very chaotic and that's not surprising for what is still a very new technology but we're now at a point where crypto is kind of stabilized the rules of the game are set and we're now in a position where it is possible to make some accurate long-term forecasts about how crypto will integrate into the global economy in future uh so that's what we're going to do today so let's start from the beginning uh a little bit about me I've basically been around crypto for 30 years pretty much my entire career has been sort of dotting backwards and forwards between working on cryptographic applications often for government finding crypto use cases in the civilian agenda and then uh I became part of the ethereum team 2014 2015 I run the one to the protocol as a project manager uh and now I run a company that does a kind of legal leg work for managing crypto projects particularly things like real world assets so real estate gold this kind of stuff um I want to start with the beginning which is the original promise of crypto was a kind of crypto Anarchist libertarian anarco capitalist Utopia the idea was that we were going to break the way that the old world worked and create a new world and that that new world was going to be dominated by privacy it was going to be impossible for governments or companies to spy on you and this was going to reel us into a kind of utopian uh sort self-realization world a world of Freedom um needless to say this is not exactly what happened so the Cypherpunks were very clear that the government was the enemy in the 1990s the dominant threat was seen as being American power and the fear was that the American government was going to dominate the entire world and you'd wind up with a kind of permanent Soul superpower [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnN8mhd8qtU&t=150s) uh scenario now that seems like ancient history because 30 years ago America was a very different place it had a very different standing globally um and in those days the fear was a kind of 1984 situation the idea was that the entire world could wind up with something like the Chinese social credit system and we were going to wind up basically losing our freedoms to these Technologies in the hands of the state the idea was a Counterattack in which the entire Financial system would be encrypted and governments would no longer be able to raise taxes this was the original first generation objective of crypto now that argument you think my God that sounds completely ridiculous who would ever think that and the answer is President Obama right 22 years later um 2016 you have Obama talking while still president about the threat that crypto Finance presents to the US system what if we are no longer able to collect taxes because of this technology what will happen this would be a problem so although these ideas are not talked about very much even inside of crypto at this point the bottom line is that they're taken extremely seriously both by the deep technologists inside of crypto but also by the state and you can understand in this situation that there is a really head-on confrontation between the power of cryptography and the need of the state to be able to monitor its people for things like tax raising um that confrontation is in the context of an almost unrecognized Mass adoption of cryptography so the little padlock in a web browser the thing that lets you know that your credit card is protected the https pwalk is cryptography that's 1990s ero link encryption you have two things which are connected to each other in the middle there could be people trying to monitor spy steal your credit cards and what happens is the little padlock is a certificate of encryption that guarantees your credit card won't be stolen off the wire this is a hugely hugely common thing it's created trillions of dollars of value and that is 1990s crypto adopted by essentially the entire planet as the backbone of trade so the expectation inside of the crypto Community is a given time you will see exactly the same kind of globalized adoption of the blockchain technology you take the sort of 2008 2014 updates to cryptography you apply them to the whole of World Trade and you get a generation of again Untold [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnN8mhd8qtU&t=300s) trillions of value so at the same time as there is this confrontational relationship with the state there is also the fact that the entire commercial World adopted 1990s crypto for protecting commercial transactions and that that's the world that we live in now so although there might be an undercurrent of tension the bottom line is that the market decided So within the last couple of years something new has happened which is other parties have entered the fry the Americans still have a very confused very hostile attitude to crypto the British government has taken a rather different track um so this is uh a statement made by the head of Civil Justice for England and Wales Sir Jeffrey Voss who is you know absolutely a you know pillar of the establishment from his perspective the blockchain is inevitable right it's an Unstoppable technological innovation because it solves real problems in warw right obliterating the scope for dispute as to what has occurred will become udicious in all major industrial and financial sectors this is a very different s uh signal from what you were getting from the American government not so long before this um similarly law commission uh has uh just gotten through legislation the UK electronic trade documentation act ETA and that enables all the documents that go with C containers to move from being um digital uh paper documents to digital documents and those digital documents create enormous enormous efficiency savings uh they suggest £224 million is a reasonable estimate that's $280 billion a year of efficiency savings because of the move to electronic trade documentation rather than uh using paper documentation and this again is coming from a government the law to enable that transformation was passed you know uh this year so you know this kind of stuff is front and center of the UK legis of agenda um similarly Lord mayor of London so that's the elected head of the UK's Financial Center which is the largest financial center in the world says that the next 20 years will be driven by smart economic networks based on AI open data and shared ledgers among other Technologies so valuable created by digitization of assets and contracts combining different types of highquality data so this is a pretty straightforward claim right the take in the UK is that there's going to be a mass adoption of blockchain type Technologies Mutual distributed ledgers if you prefer and that those Technologies are going to [7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnN8mhd8qtU&t=450s) become integral to global trade so '90s crypto you get the little pwalk at in Noble's e-commerce trillions of dollars of value are created including companies like Amazon now Mutual distributed ledgers blockchain technology things like ethereum same kind of process but instead of now it being retail it's now going to be wholesale it's going to be the whole industrial back hle this will be how industry functions so that transformational PR process is not just the UK this is also the EU the EU has a set of rules called MAA uh markets and crypto assets that basically establishes the EU which is the world's largest economy by the way uh as having a single set of rules for the entire Continental block for using the blockchain in real world use cases so this will be things like mortgages it will be things like purchasing Logistics Supply chains it will also tie up very closely to the uh EU digital product passport Reg legislation and the EU digital product passports are going to be applied to all consumer goods in the future um I think all apply most to give you the ability to do things like circular economy and to let you know how the packaging is going to be disposed of most of that stuff is going to wind up on blockchains inside of this framework MAA so what I want to suggest is that between Obama in 2016 and the present in that nearly 10-year period what's happened is that the blockchain has won there's been a Tassa acceptance okay this thing is actually really useful we need to figure out how we're going to slot it into our society but we will slot it into our society so adoption is now certain the question is adoption on what terms um the big transformers in that transformation are wely to do with security so the first thing is that the blockchain assets stopped being currencies and they stopped directly competing with the government Bitcoin basically tries to suggest that it's going to be a replacement for the dollar this is not true for things like nfts of artwork it's not true for electronic trade documents all of these things are just very different use cases and they don't have anything like the same kind of political risk attached um similarly most of the wallets are no longer Anonymous so in the old days there was no way of telling who owned a Bitcoin wallet now you've got things like CH analysis it's relatively easy to figure out who owns most wallets or you're using things like regular aate exchanges so there's kyc AML CTF on those wallets as a condition of them being used on exchanges so all of that stuff has really settled down uh and finally Mass [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnN8mhd8qtU&t=600s) adoption has occurred so in the states more Americans in the under 30 age group own crypto than stocks it's about 20% of the population uh of that age group so at that point you're in a position where it's very very very hard to argue with young people about what they're going to do to some degree that forces government to accommodate um as for government wants from these Technologies the first thing is they don't want to rock the boat too much they want the world to be much of a place that is now but a little improved um they also want a better economy so that talk of $280 billion of savings from electronic trade documents that's the kind of thing that makes government go okay we're going to do this uh and finally they're very clear that they're not going to have any of this tax starvation nonsense and so what you've already beg to see is heavy pressure on uh government uh from government to not have Anonymous transactions and we'll come back to that in a second so in this new world what you see is a lot of small nations are beginning to take a lead on this Singapore Dubai Estonia Venezuela the London Financial Center um uh Zug and Switzerland lonstein um lots of these countries and jurisdictions have set up Advanced jurisdictional structures that give people the ability to get things done with crypto now rather than waiting for further changes in land um sorry further changes in law and this kind of model you know adoption by far sort of uh small jurisdictions with long eyes you know you change the way the law works you get some Mass adoption you show how things work the Estonian Eid system was like that it's exactly that kind of model where you have a breakthrough in one place and then everybody follows up obviously this should be of interest to all small jurisdictions um Central Bank digital currencies another huge area of Interest I would expect two years from now that we will see a digital Euro a digital pound potentially and probably some further experiments with digital doers it's a very simple play um but then what of this old Vision right the idea that there was going to be you know some kind of great Global superpower clamp down from the Americans and they were going to run the world the answer is that's gone right it's just gone the world is multi-polar it's inevitably going to be a negotiation between a whole set of different large Powers we're no longer in a position of having a single Global ruler looks like a threat in the way that it did in the 1990s at that point [12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnN8mhd8qtU&t=750s) the 1990s vision of how this kind of Freedom was going to exist and how it was going to be necessary has to some degree softened it's not the same world that it was in the '90s the vision of where crypto fits into the global system has to change so where we are now is a new compromise and it is a compromise it is not what the crypto people wanted but it does give you kind of a sense of the shape of the future so the first thing is kyc and everything the second thing is that the assets issued in crypto get legal status and the kind of regulatory Gap from really the Trump election through to the uh end of the covid emergency that sort of regulatory black hole is slowly filling in and government is catching up and tidying everything up so we're now kind of in a position where it's much easier for people to see how crypto is going to integrate into the real world and where all those pie will fit but what comes with that is the end of this era of kind of decadent Anonymous finance and the rule of the dent it's a new world so probably the final shot at the old world the thing that was kind of the death now of the old vision of crypto was the conviction of a developer of a technology called Tornado cash um I won't bore you with the details but basically it was a technology for essentially wandering money that was what government alleged and the developer was convicted even though they did not use the technology they just created the technology for other people to use that almost certainly will have a universal chilling effect on people developing these kind of Technologies and as a result you're probably going to see an end to that kind of financial privacy technology on crypto I don't think anybody is going to be happy with that but that does seem likely to be the future that we're going into fortunately or unfortunately um at the same time there's a lot of concern about deep fake Tex and the ability of AI to fake documents and video so I think you can also expect there to be large scale adoption of crypto as a way of securing things like news and at that point you're kind of established in a situation where crypto secures the news channels and it makes sure the social media isn't filled with propaganda but at the same time you don't get to use it to launder money Mass adoption but maybe not the kind of libertarian stuff that people had once hoped for uh and blockchain and I are very much mutually enabling Technologies they work very well together because the blockchain gives the AI systems trustworthy access to the real world and lets AI systems take action like for example buying [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnN8mhd8qtU&t=900s) things so here we are right the 1990s Cipher Bank Revolution not happening right and a lot of that is because there's just been so much scamming on crypto nobody believes the promises that it's going to create a better world anymore through this kind of Freedom turns out that the freedom needed to come with effective self-regulation and without that there's been so much abuse of these technologies that we've lost access to the political vision which is crypto is going to make the world a better place by enabling Anonymous trade we've had 10 years of anonymous trade most of it has been really really bad quality stuff and now at that point the crypto Anarchist vision is basically parked again um but it's not parked because it was fully implemented right this is from the you know 1994 document I quote at the beginning right the uh Cypher Cypher noic and the crypto Anarchist Manifesto so it says very clearly that you need reputation systems right you need systems for reputation you need trust you need some kind of systemic model of Justice if you don't have these things it is very very difficult to build anything resembling a functioning economy on crypto so you either have to self-regulate or you will be regulated crypto did not manage effective self-regulation they never managed to set up a situation where there were very good systems for verifying whether projects were fraud want or non for aan there weren't systems for getting on top of the problem if something did turn out to have a defect there wasn't an insurance model there wasn't a court there wasn't dispute resolution basically we left people with no rights and they were left offend for themselves in an environment where people who had a lot more understanding of the technology and a lot more access were basically taking their assets so I would suggest here that this is not a failure of the cyberpunk model of the world uh or the cypherpunk model of the world I should say but it's a failure to implement that model Faithfully without the reputation systems without systems of trust without systems of Justice there's no way of doing this um so final point is we're entering the era of regulatory neglect this is the part where most of the regulatory power is going into dealing with AI That's the new Hot Topic it's having very large social impacts already um government is probably not going to do much new with crypto from this point onwards it will settle in as an accepted part of the rainstream trade system and [17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnN8mhd8qtU&t=1050s) after that this is the equilibrium we'll get until the next technological Revolution arrives so I just want to leave you with one thought which is e-commerce was built on strong cryptography the '90s revolution built the entire e-commerce system I would suggest that the Bitcoin and ethereum revolutions are going to build the next system and probably what that's going to do is take the entire global system for real estate and finally modernize it so that real estate is exchanged electronically so that container shipping moov moves into an electronic format and that will fuel another enormous expansion in the economy as these otherwise hard to digitize asset classes are digitize and that's going to be the future it's not that crypto has failed but it's mainstreamed into the world that we have rather than creating a new world around it uh thank you very much [Music] --- End of [558] Event Spotlight - Talk at LOGIN 2024 - Can regulators and crypto ever get along? Find out!. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [557](https://guptaoption.com/texts/557.md) The Future of Real Estate RWA (2024); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.