# Vinay Gupta at The Promise of the Blockchain 2015

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [562]. 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, 2024-03-15 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1R9wRgsguQ. 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): Early ledger-layer explainer.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Cyberpunk (1984): The 1980s cyberpunk culture that came first; first computer a ZX81 in 1982.
  - 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)
  - 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:
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - 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)
  - 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: Information markets — universal registers and digital twins (27%); culture / history / fiction (18%); blockchain / speed / light (18%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: science fiction (8 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Cypherpunks (3 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); cypherpunk (3 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); shared database (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); internet money (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); ledgers (1 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); gold standard (1 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Cyberpunk (1 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); ConsenSys (1 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2002)
- Importance: core-text score 0.32 (1.00 is the top), number 220 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [683] [CommunityZ Chest - Vinay Gupta, Founder of Mattereum, In... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/683.md): same career work: Cyberpunk
  - [760] [Vinay Gupta - Across the Abyss: From Myth to Reality @... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/760.md): same career work: Cyberpunk
- On the same works, just before: [564] [Vinay Gupta at 'A Decade of #Ethereum' (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/564.md); [563] [10 Minute Explainer For The Current State Of Ethereum (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/563.md); [45] [PERMANENT SUMMER: THE NEW MATR TOKEN…And Why The RWA... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/45.md)
- On the same works, just after: [666] [The Evolution of Fractional Ownership Tokens 1 (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/666.md); [665] [Evolution of Financial Instruments (Part 1) (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/665.md); [664] [Evolution of Financial Instruments (Part. 2) (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/664.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 at The Promise of the Blockchain 2015, video, 2024-03-15, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1R9wRgsguQ; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [562], https://guptaoption.com/texts/562.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1R9wRgsguQ&t=0s) okay so um does anybody feel they actually understand this blockchain stuff now show of hands if you feel like you got it anybody want to come up here and explain it for me okay so I'm going to go back and really try and nail this thing down so that you wind up with an operational understanding of the blockchain that will allow you to correctly interpret its significance in your life right and to do that we have to go back really 50 or so years into the early days of computing because what what is making this so confusing is that most of the practitioners in the blockchain space have 50 years of History packed into their heads which forms an implicit Matrix in which words like distributed database hang so to really get this to hang together we've got to go all the way back and we're going to go through this kind of quickly but I want to try and lay out the foundations in the past so that we can meaningfully talk about the future so we conveniently have this uh stage which is set out in lumps and I'm going to make each one of these basically a 10-year span so right back somewhere over here in the darkness of History we've got the second world war which is where the computer was was originally created right the computer is it currently exists was developed as a weapon to defeat the Nazis it was used to crack the codes that allowed the Allies to paralyze the German war effort and eventually defeat them and the link between cryptography and computation goes all the way back to the birth in fact if you go even further back the analog computers these monstrous brass devices which were used way back in the day were actually created to calculate Gunnery tables for naval ships at War they wanted to be able to calculate the trajectory of artillery so you come forward into the 1950s and you get this kind of demilitarized Computing all these machines and all of these Engineers that have left the services and are coming in to you know create a new generation we're going to take all this former military gear and we're going to put it in the hands of businesses and back in this prehistory the computers are the size of this room they weigh tons the guy from IBM famously says that there might be a World Market for perhaps five

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1R9wRgsguQ&t=150s) computers a year right H the data is stored on punched cards and then eventually one inch wide magnetic tapes uh and the complexity of these systems is such that it takes a room full of programmers to get a simple reliable system to do something that process an invoice right this is the prehistory and this is the mid mid 1960s that we're talking about so the game really begins to be recognizable in 1970 uh when you get the creation of an abstraction called SQL in IBM by a guy called Cod Edward Cod I think anyway Cod so SQL is this extremely forceful application of mathematics to bring order to the chaos of tape machines back here you've got a whole bunch of data basically just spattered across magnetic tape and you've got huge machines that process the tape but when you want to retrieve something you have to go and fish for the data yourself move tape number three forward 17 ft find me the record and give me back the first name and programming these things is glacially slow it's nightmarish so here is the first place where the heavy math really enters the picture in this story which is the SQL abstraction assumes that you create a multi-dimensional cube one tape machine per axis of the cube five tape machines five dimensional cubes Cube you can imagine it kind of hanging in space you then have an abstract algebra which allows you to take a Locus a set space inside of the five-dimensional cube specify in ways which make sense to programmers fairly intuitively see where there might be a gap there and pull that in that set of data out into something that looks like a spreadsheet and that conceptual jump was at the time so revolutionary it took people about 5 years to accept that it had happened and that it actually worked and what came out of that was the Golden Age of SQL right 1970 to 1990 just about all that we did was take every single thing that we could fit into a database in business or in the wider world and we shoved it into a database and right here in 1970 the machines were incredibly expensive and Incredibly Fragile the people working with the Mach maches actually wore white

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1R9wRgsguQ&t=300s) coats because if you weren't wearing a white coat stray fibers from your clothing could interfere with the tapes Jam the tape machines and destroy all your customer data right so imagine this very fragile very Arcane very expensive system it's only just become technically feasible these things are like laboratory artifacts right it's like going into you know CERN or something like that when you want to inspect one of them and this sets the mind set for databases right the way through' 70s up until the beginning of the 80s that's the psychological condition of the database and the organizations become siloed because all of the information that makes your organization work is stored inside of one of these data temples right right around 84 you get the microcomputer Revolution the IBM PC the Apple all this kind of stuff and these are appliances they're things that you can buy like a television and plug into your office they are robust they're reasonably cheap as as little as four or $5,000 amazing right they are fairly easy to maintain and repair they're relatively resistant to dust and humidity they're pretty much like a television in terms of their operating characteristics one per desk seems possible and weirdly enough they can actually run database software on them you can actually have a database kind of sort of like the big thing you had over here but actually living on the machine that you have in front of you and the kind of first real heavy use of an application that works in that environment is a thing called Lotus 123 which is the first spreadsheet and this begins a revolution that goes all the way through accounting but we're not going to talk about accounting too much but if you want to think about computers and ledgers starts here back in the 80s now this is 15 years from you know enormously fragile machinery and enormous expense through to it sits on a desktop can you imagine how disoriented the people that lived through that technological transformation were it was just as weird as what's happening now but it was happening somewhere over there because we hadn't invented the internet to bring you the news that something weird had happened with computers now we get to kind of 1990 the networking push really starts a long way back but it takes a long time to get the networking stuff to work 1990 is about

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1R9wRgsguQ&t=450s) where you begin to get networking that's practical for real stuff uh I got my first email account about 91 and at that point there was no worldwide web there was a computer there was email there were chat programs but if you wanted a document from another machine you got an interface that looked a bit like a file browser and you clicked on the document you want and then it loaded it onto your machine and then you opened it in something to take a look at it and the notion that you could build build the thing to read the document into the thing that got you the document was quite radical that was sort of a big deal and that was why the web was a big deal now one more bit of weird Paradigm stuff right over here through this period the Computing is very much centered around data it's structured it's hard it's rigid it's formulated it's tabulated the the stuff is very rigid the web Builds on a different model of computing which is called document Centric right document Centric computers are paper simulators right they hand you things which look like documents you got email it looks like a letter um you open up a graphics program it looks like a canvas that are things that look like paint brushes the entire model of computing that we're using right now is document Centric Computing and the connection between databases and that sort of data Centric Computing and document Centric computing is extremely weak there are two completely different ways of getting the machine to do stuff for you and getting data into documents is tricky as anybody who's ever done an Excel merge knows and seriously right it's hard getting documents into Data is even harder which is the entire mess of content Management Systems right scanning documents all of that stuff these two things don't mix together at all well so we come out through the '90s and you kind of get to Mid 95 maybe early 96 and people suddenly realize that one day in the future you'll be able to make money on the internet there's just one problem there's no security which means if you type your credit card into an internet form it will be bounced all around the internet anybody can read it and they can steal money out your account it's another five years until we get a widely deployed solution that allows us to have encryption which lets us move credit cards around the internet e-commerce doesn't really become a thing

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1R9wRgsguQ&t=600s) until what 1999 2000 right so we're already here by the time you've got a computer that is capable of taking a payment from you know the the internet again how fast is the rate of change does anybody even remember when you couldn't put credit cards into the internet when you were all alive pretty much but we forget so quickly what was possible or impossible when new technology arrives we just going to watch the memory app it's quite hard even to think about what it was like before we had cell phones so you come forward to 2010 by 2010 I'm going to suggest that more or less everything you could do on a web page had been done to at least the first approximation more or less all the basic stuff was there if you could do it with a computer that was basically a paper simulator it had been done more or less now this is also roughly when Bitcoin gets started and Bitcoin starts in some you know FES ing little weird counterculture on the internet which I spent my entire 1990s in called cypherpunk and the cypherpunks are straight out of Science Fiction they can't tell the difference between science fiction and reality they generally speaking have an emotional intelligence quotient of around 75 to 50 uh it took me a long time to grow out of that and one of the things which makes that scene work the way that it does is the enormous prevalence of autism so whenever you hear somebody ragging on the Nerds right whenever you hear somebody ragging on the Nerds remember what they're doing generally speaking is picking on autistic people right it's really important to understand that the people building the Technologies on which your Society completely depends the people without whom the lights go out and the food stays cold are heavily heavily heavily tending towards being on the autistic Spectrum so when you hear people laughing at the Nerds remember they're laughing at people that are disabled they're also the people that your civilization depends on so don't screw with them right so the cypherpunks come out and basically say in a very naive way why do we need government and they go and they build this thing which is essentially a Central Bank of the internet now you sort of think well that was a bit of a big jump how did we go from we can finally take a credit card to Central Bank of the internet right that's what all of us spent about five years wondering as well what the hell did they do right because the technology arrived raw we couldn't go down what satoshi's intent was because Satoshi was a ghost

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1R9wRgsguQ&t=750s) right the software was dropped onto the internet there was sarily discussion and then the guy vanished so we have no idea who Satoshi was we don't know what the intent was there was nobody to go to conferences and Pitch the technology we were left with an artifact that to all intents and purposes might have been created by a time traveler and dropped it's that big a jump um so what did they do what they did was this right back over here the databases were singular they existed in a in an atomic State one database per Enterprise the network existed in some relational sense between Enterprises but because the database was perceived as being too fragile to let anybody touch the database never directly communicated with the network you always had lots and lots and lots of guards and buffers and other stuff in between to prevent the two things working properly and if you did actually connect the databases kind of directly to each each other you got another problem which was the database encoded the world viiew of the organization two organizations two different World Views you always needed something in between to translate so you never got large scale computer Toom connections that allowed you to create a shared model of reality between lots of different organizations and this shows up every day when you try and do something like process a a claim on insurance and you have to fill in the name and address details 74 times for different organizations often three or four times for the same organization the databases are kept separate from each other there's no real connectivity between them and when you try and build connections between the systems the complexity builds to the point where it's too expensive to do so what they say you know mean when they say the word distributed database is a database which is both like a database and like a network and this is Genius of Bitcoin it fuses together the database and the network into a seamless hole called a blockchain everywhere there is data there is network and everywhere there is Network there is data they're completely fused inside of these systems so what that means is rather than having all of these individual kind of Ivory Tower computer systems connected by a network and then all the costs of moving things in and out you have a single shared story of reality spread across all the machines simultaneously and when it

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1R9wRgsguQ&t=900s) changes in one place it changes everywhere and this is such a powerful abstraction it's such a powerful technology that the first thing they implemented was the Central Bank of the internet that was the first thing they did can you imagine what act 2 and three are going to look like right you open by creating a single Global Currency which is the first thing that has worked that way since we went off the gold standard and the technology deployed is so powerful that it was done by either one individual or a small group that remained secret they basically reinvented gold and that was the first move this is unimaginable strangeness to somebody that spent their entire life time monkeying around with computers oh my god what have we done so you get up to kind of where we are now right basically 2015 2016 we're sort of Midway through the process Bitcoin is well established as a reality everybody is comfortable with bitcoin's existence to some degree what is it it's a bank account that stores magic internet money that comes from the Central Bank of the internet which is a decentralized database which is everywhere nowhere maintained by a bunch of people you don't understand but the funny thing is that if I describe to you how your government works it's even worse right so every four years we hold a popularity contest regionally we pick the person that is most likable on television more or less regardless of their values we know nothing about them because they're protected by privacy that surrounds most individuals so they could be a person playing a role and then we assemble these people into a large group that gets to decide who lives and who dies every day right so you know don't assume that because the new stuff is weird it's any weirder than the old stuff the old stuff stuff is just weird stuff you got used to now let me move a little forward to this whole smart contract thing right so the smart contract is the third big integrative step first we merge the network and the database to make the blockchain then we take computer software code and put it into the shared database into the blockchain so we take a little program and they can only be little because it's just the beginning of the story and we take the little program and we store it in the

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1R9wRgsguQ&t=1050s) blockchain and that means everybody that's connected to the blockchain has the copy of exactly the same program and programs when you run the program same data same code same result so now everybody's got a copy of the database everybody's got a copy of the code we all run the code at the same time we all put the output back into the blockchain if there's a disagreement we find it immediately we sort it out so in that sort of environment you have these little programs which are just as transactional as sending people money it's like a wire transfer you hit go here the money flows across the network it pops up there it's like a Bitcoin payment what kind of things do the little programs do if this job has been done pay Bob if the job hasn't been done by the 31st of March send the money back to Alice tiny tiny little pieces of business logic pulled out of the application stock and put to the blockchain instead and this is the third big unification uh I work for a company called ConsenSys that uses ethereum which is the first really durable smart contract platform to build lots of applications and those little programs do things like make sure the artists get paid when their music is listened to they do things like streamline transactions between Banks they do all kinds of simple useful things and we're still only at the very beginning of the story uh right now the Bitcoin system processes about seven transactions a second the ethereum system does something like 20 right so these are way back in terms of speed they're way back over there where computers were in the 1960s on punched cards now brace yourselves right now the challenge is to produce a thing called a scaled blockchain and a scaled blockchain is a blockchain that doesn't do 20 transactions a second it does roughly the same number number of transactions a second as Visa or Swift 10,000 50,000 100,000 transactions a second quarter of a million transactions a second and the scaled blockchain is something that begins to provide us with something that looks like a global Computing surface onto which things like the internet things could be loaded you could take the entire Global Financial system and push it into a scaled blockchain you could take the entire internet of things and push it into a scaled blockchain you could take all of those machines in the cloud you could put blockchain software

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1R9wRgsguQ&t=1200s) onto them as Microsoft recently did with a thing called Zur and then you could have a single Global Computing surface that took all of our different bits and pieces of computing power and turned them into a Global Knowledge resource that basically manages the fundamental infrastructures of our society instead of the cobbled together nonsense that you get every time you talk to your bank right and because these computer systems don't create new locuses of political control when they're built because they're decentralized what you don't get is a position where the basic infrastructure of your Society the stack that your Society runs on is automatically owned by a set of Corporations or even a set of governments what you have is something which is constituted by the will of the people and serves their purposes which is after all the original intention of government now this is where we have to go back and separate reality from fantasy because this is the mistake that's made it almost impossible for people to understand Bitcoin remember I mentioned the cypherpunks back here and their inability to tell the difference between science fiction and political reality the notion that we're simply going to automate away all of the things which constitute government makes a ton of sense to people that spend 23 hours a day online right and I'm really framing this very carefully because this is causing enormous trouble but if you're somebody that spends only a little bit of your time interacting with computers it's pretty obvious that the computer only exists as a rectangle of glowing light somewhere in your room or in your hand right and out here from that perspective it's pretty clear that if you teach computers govern resources a lot of trivial stuff in your life gets a lot easier like paying your taxes or making sure that your telephone works or you know doing your banking whatever happens to be but it's not obvious that this is a replacement for the general edifice of government and the tension between the way the world looks to the technologists and the way the world looks to everybody else is what's at the heart of the fight with entities like uber because Uber makes perfect sense to a technologist and it really upsets people that have run a taxi Monopoly for 150 years and those kind of discussions and tensions are as much about the different neurological makeup of the people who develop the worldview as they are about the technology what we're really having here is a discussion of about what kinds of Minds run our society is our society

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1R9wRgsguQ&t=1350s) predominantly run by Charming glib slightly sociopathic people who look good on television or is it predominantly run by people that live in front of computers and control the world with numbers right and that debate has gone on inside of our culture since the two cultures period of British history where there was this discussion about whether Arts and Sciences could ever get along well turns out the Sciences guys are now figuring out how to govern instead of the lawyers and this is creating an enormous amount of turbulence but the turbulence is not well described because it's happening extremely quickly and the only place that there's a literary cannon that really describes these processes is science fiction right if you want mental models of how to think about the reality that we're currently in you have to go back to the science fiction of 30 years ago published under a general title of cypherpunk right and cypherpunk was the fiction that describes the reality that we're now in it's about virtual reality it's about drones it's about biotechnology that regrows your nervous system it's about virtual currencies and artificial intelligence and we would all have a much better grip on the reality that we found ourselves in if science fiction hadn't been kicked out of the literary Cannon sometime after World War II there's a definite push where science fiction is pushed away from the mainstream of literature and into its own kind of genre box and as a result the place where most of the think and Analysis has been done about these Technologies and what they mean to us as a society has been banished from polite company it all exists in a place called genre fiction and it's no longer considered to be real literature as a result the mainstream kind of Arts population have been left without Mythic narratives to allow them to interpret the reality that the technicians have created and what we've seen this evening is a perfect demonstration of that Gap because actually getting the message across requires a complet complely different perspective to the one which is natural to the technicians you know I'm lucky in that I've managed to bridge that Gap uh because I was always as much a writer as I was a programmer and I've done about equal amounts of both in my life so the thing that I want to leave you with is this the dialogue about how these Technologies are going to fit into our society is going to be a dialogue about class it's going to be about whether the society is run by lawyers or technicians both are the wrong answer it has to be run by the people but for the people to be able to intelligently make

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1R9wRgsguQ&t=1500s) decisions in a society where the core technologies that run our society are rapidly uh becoming so complicated we no longer understand them we have to do better than guessing which technocrat or which lawyer to put in charge without a fundamental reawaken of of Reawakening of interest in science and technology and without reclaiming science fiction as a fundamental Literacy for the present that we're in we're going to be left making decisions more or less at random depending on what Charming person tells us the new story so my challenge to all of you is start reading cyberpunk it's painful right it's painful right it's much of it is not very well written many of the ideas look almost like it's kind of weird pop boil or fiction about the present but if you sift through carefully and I'd suggest starting with an anthology called Mirror Shades which is a short little book with short stories nothing to challenge you too much right if you go go back and read that stuff what you could begin to flashh out is the stories that all of the programmers had in their heads when they built these Technologies and that's how you get your head around what's happening if you share the myths that the technical class have when they create these things you can begin to understand the technology in a Mythic way which is how we understand it you have to learn the ways of our people because you're living in the world that we create for

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End of [562] Vinay Gupta at The Promise of the Blockchain 2015. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [666](https://guptaoption.com/texts/666.md) The Evolution of Fractional Ownership Tokens 1 (2024); the most closely related, [683](https://guptaoption.com/texts/683.md) CommunityZ Chest - Vinay Gupta, Founder of Mattereum, In... (2020); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.