# Vinay Gupta at 'A Decade of #Ethereum'

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [564]. 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, 2024-01-23 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smcEf6qhqdg. 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): History of the ledger layer.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Ethereum launch (2015): Release coordinator for the July 2015 launch of Ethereum, the programmable blockchain.
  - 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)
  - People's Cloud architecture and futures in 1000 words (2013): Blog essay: the data center is doomed, its efficiency is bought with centralization and monitoring, and... (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:
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products.
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut...
  - 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)
- Topics: Cryptography, encryption & cypherpunks (29%); Bitcoin, libertarianism & the state (14%); Crypto compliance & money laundering (14%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: DigiGold (2 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2021); PGP (3 here; 16 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); network states (2 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2024); cryptoeconomics (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); communications (4 here; 81 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 5 undated); world computer (1 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); smart contracts (5 here; 110 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); scams (1 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); contracts (7 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); The DAO (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2016)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): network states
- Importance: core-text score 0.37 (1.00 is the top), number 184 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [783] [Vinay Gupta / DCxPrague (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/783.md): same career work: Ethereum launch
  - [680] [Blockchain technology, trade-offs, and helping launch... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/680.md): same career work: Ethereum launch
- On the same works, just before: [712] [Compilation: Vinay Gupta (Mattereum / Ethereum) on Visa,... (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/712.md); [565] [Coin Telegraph AMA with Mattereum's Vinay Gupta 14th... (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/565.md); [783] [Vinay Gupta / DCxPrague (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/783.md)
- On the same works, just after: [45] [PERMANENT SUMMER: THE NEW MATR TOKEN…And Why The RWA... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/45.md); [562] [Vinay Gupta at The Promise of the Blockchain 2015 (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/562.md); [665] [Evolution of Financial Instruments (Part 1) (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/665.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 'A Decade of #Ethereum', video, 2024-01-23, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smcEf6qhqdg; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [564], https://guptaoption.com/texts/564.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smcEf6qhqdg&t=0s) all right well hi everyone uh so I'm B uh and I was the launch coordinator for the ethereum release in 2015 uh joined ethereum in late 2014 uh attended Dev Kong zero in Berlin which was just the team uh and I have all of the stories from the old days although I was not there for many of the worst and craziest of those stories were the 2013 stories um so what I thought I do is a very brief summary of the prehistory of how we got to ethereum and what happens next right so everybody sort of thinks that ethereum starts with Bitcoin right Bitcoin Master coin the IDE taking smart contracts and adding them to this wonderful thing that you call watching and that is true but it's only true at a point because there is a prehistory before that prehistory which is a thing by the name of uh digigold right digigold building on top of thing called eold so in the late 1990s there is a digital currency called eold and eold is a account based if have a vault in Dubai got I don't know $160 Million worth of gold and they use it as backing for a currency which is gr denominated so one eold token equals one gram of gold and the right to claim the gold out of the Vault and that system is run by an oncologist in Florida called Doug Jackson and it becomes quite a successful company and they have an enormously powerful system in 1999 you could transfer $100,000 of gold from one cell phone to another cell phone for 50 cents instantaneously right a kind of performance that we still haven't recovered with the blockchain um on the back of that was created a system called digigo and dig gold was a fully tokenized version of eold so they did a thing that was essentially akin to a blockchain it was more centralized but it still had wallets it had cryptographic tokens and those tokens were exchangeable for eold and then the eag could be extracted in the form of physical coins uh I actually spent quite a bit of time using that system and for most of year paid my rent in gold coins surprising for the time period

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smcEf6qhqdg&t=150s) um and before that you have pgp right pgp is the great grand area where it all starts where it comes from nobody knows there is somebody that is said to be the person that wrote pgp but the common understanding is it was actually leaked by a bunch of computer security people working for the American government who kind of handed off to somebody and said get this out to the public it's too important to be secret right and then before that trapdoor ciphers which were invented in the UK gchq I'm going to say maybe 19 19 77 or 1972 so there's a kind of long prehistory the crypto before crypto in the '90s crypto meant secure Communications the first cryptographic Revolution was the integration of cryptography into web browsers which enabled what did it turn on what happened when we put crypto in web browsers e-commerce right a multi-trillion dollar industry came from sprinkling just a little bit of cryptography into the web protocols that allowed for the protection of credit card numbers allowed for the secure identification of shops you know all that https certificate infrastructure that tells you amazon.com is amazon.com that's what we had in said VNS and that plus the little https pad unlocked trillions of dollars of value right that's how powerful cryptography is the first sprinkling of crypto into the web unlock trilli right and then there was no more consumer adoption of crypto there was no new cryptography integrated into the global ecosystem until Bitcoin right and Bitcoin is commonly believed to be a response to eag being shut down by the American government if you think who is Satoshi somewhere within two handshakes of the Eagles organization is almost certainly where you find the origin of the saty group I have my fearings other people are theirs then you have the formation of the Bitcoin pip paper everybody understands that right you know it's published nothing is ever the same again the system spins up and gradually acquires utility and value critical turning points like the banking blls PID Wikileaks which is the first point where a lot of people begin to get politically interested in Bitcoin then why doesn't Bitcoin Implement smart contracts and that question why doesn't Bitcoin Implement smart this to me is the great religious issue of the day right because if Bitcoin had a yes to Smart contract

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smcEf6qhqdg&t=300s) there would not be a second system right all of the energy behind Bitcoin all the energy behind ethereum all the energy behind everything else it would be the single point of an enormous driven Spear and we did not get that because Bitcoin said no to progress they said no to transformation they said no to change Bitcoin decided that they had evolved as far as they needed to and they were going to stay right there and whether that is a wise strategy or not not we don't know so we have an Avant guard which is ethereum and then all the things came after ethereum and then with the old school which is the bitcoiners and whether they turn out to be smart people that stuck to fundamentals or neanderthals too soon to tell give it another 20 years maybe another 50 years when we get to ethereum there are three generations of political Vision inside of ethereum right there is the thing which is inherited from Bitcoin Co there is the radicalized Canadians and there is the heartless scammers and this is the three great generations of what people have when they think ethereum so the version of ethereum which just inherits from Bitcoin is the people that think that ether ether is going to be the Global Currency it's the people that think in terms of freedom to transact it's the people that are very much about the idea of doing the kind of you know Direct takeover from the nation state and a direct takeover from the dollar right it's basically ethereum it's like Bitcoin but it's got far contracts the theory of change is an enormous push towards the ether price climbs and climbs and climbs and climbs and climbs dely asset in the world is denominated in ether that is the kind of generation one political Vision in ethereum has everybody met people that kind of think about it that way you don't see many of them these days but there are a few of them right then you get kind of wave two and I would look at theic in Wave 2 um these are the radicalized Canadians right and the kind of apex of that is a book called radical markets by Glenn W and the sort of vision here is things like quadratic voting right you reduce the cost of building new social structures because you can use Smart contracts to do it those social structures control assets the control of assets using these new social structures enables transformation of the way societ works and you can do much cheaper

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smcEf6qhqdg&t=450s) experiments in evolving Society because you use software to run the bureaucracy you don't need to build a new government Department you need a smart contract in that and this idea that we can incrementally improve the functioning of the World by putting more and more load on automated bureaucracy rather than attempting political transformation Through The Ballot Box is to kind of build your way to your LOM Utopia model right and I would suggest the Apex of that model is all the stuff that's coming out around Network States from biy there's this I went to the network States conference in Amsterdam and there's a huge amount of enthusiasm about building weekly State likee entities what I would call weasels weekly State likee entities um on the blockchain right you have a cryptocurrency you have a community you buy a bunch of land and you put all that stuff together into a bundle and it creates a sort of miniature State like thing lots of enthusiasm about that and I would say that is the apex of the radicalized Canadian Vision right kind of libertarian kind of utopian but a lot more socialist than the kind of Hardline currency driven Bitcoin generation and I think everybody will have seen quite a lot of action around that the DAO people are a big part of that as well what to work on Dows what to work on your quadratic funding getcoin all of that is in this bucket I called the radicalized Canadians and then finally we have a big problem in the space face which is the radicalized Canadians have been unable to fight off the scammers right and I remember when the scammers arrived right our conferences went to being you know a bunch of nerds in various kinds of band T-shirts standing around in their big black boots yapping to each other about consensus algorithms to Slick computer graphics and really impressive slide presentations and people that have been trained to speak in the Tony Robbins School of sincerity right and when those folks arrived what you end up with was a problem because when you had people coming to find out what ethereum was you had the people that understood what ethereum was who were generally speaking poor presenters and then you had the people that understood how to sell scans didn't really understand what it was they were selling and didn't have to and those people went through the space like dentry through a refugee camp right and I would suggest

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smcEf6qhqdg&t=600s) that they have destroyed 90% of the value in the ethereum space over the last say four or five years right I want to say that again I would suggest the scammers have destroyed 90% of the value in the ethereum space right you wonder why the coin is floating around $2,000 rather than $20,000 the answer is ethereum has become synonymous with fraud right if you hear that your cousin has gotten super into the blockchain do you think my God that's going to be amazing or do you think they're going to lose their house in their car right and that fear that we have that being involved in the blockchain is now a bad thing that is fear of the grifters it's fear that people that don't really understand the technology are going to get slick marketing for a deal that should be illegal and probably is and they're going to get ripped off for everything that they own if the scammers can manage it and we've become so tolerant of this that the culture has turned terms like rug poool rug pool means fraen people should go to jail rug pool we have Smart contracts that are perfectly capable of making it technically impossible for people to rug pool but the general ethereum user population are so ignorant about what the technology is and how it works they don't even insist that the contracts are structured that way so that they cannot get rubbed right the entire cycle of Destruction around nfts if there had been a single decent intellectual property license commissioned by openc and attached to uh everything by default right here's the openc public license or the boate to public license anything which is going to get done on the blockchain you have that license by default if you want a different license feel free to upload it but you will have a license if they had done that for intellectual property open C would be the world hub for clearing intellectual property rights and it would be doing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of transactions a month and it would have created enormously powerful Global liquid markets for IP you would be able to literally license a board AP to Disney to do a TV show rather than the situation right now where nobody can really pin down what you buy when you buy an nft that as a result of a laxidasical attitude towards the deal because if you don't clearly Define the terms what the hell is somebody buying right so I going to leave you with the thought which is I think that we really screwed up horribly when we decided the decentralization was what BL chain was about I think that was a

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smcEf6qhqdg&t=750s) fundamental error of judgment and I think it is not too late to fix it what we wanted was systems that were Incorruptible and we thought decentralized meant Incorruptible because if you gave the power to the people the power would be used wisely but in fact what we've discovered is you give the power to the people the people that are really good at being Predators on the People by taking advantage of their Goodwill and their ignorance the scamers the Griff gter right we gave the power to the people and then the scammers and the grifters took it right back off them again so I think that we need to start thinking in terms of the blockchain is intended to produce Incorruptible systems right you get exactly what you pay for nobody gets in the way and if they do the cryptoeconomics or the legals squash them like Banks right and that idea of creating an ethereum where the scammers get crushed like bugs and you know that it happened on ethereum it's a square deal and you get what you paid for that is the future that I'm working towards creating and that was the original vision of ethereum that was what we promised to ourselves that we were going to create in 2015 you go back and look at the ethereum foundation Communications incorruptibility is The Core theme there's a video that gin mood uh was uh the kind of primary architect of called ethereum World computer produced by the foundation in 2015 and it really has this notion of an Incorruptible system so that's what I going to leave you with right we have an absolute imperative to get the scammers out of the ecosystem we have to do this or the ecosystem is going to die and I think the focus has to be not on decentralization but on incorruptibility because Incorruptible systems can be used to identify the scammers and kick them off is this thing that you're doing Incorruptible or not well no it's really decentralized that we don't care bam get off the watching we're not going to do this so raise the bar right demand incorruptibility if you're going to put any money behind any project demand incorruptibility if you're working on a project demand incorruptibility take the power away from the administrator so it's impossible to run use Smart contracts to lock up all the value you know nail down the legals that are excellent law firms are fully functional now to actually get you what you want on that in very very

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smcEf6qhqdg&t=900s) short timelines right we can make the blockchain live up to its potential but if we fail to do it it's going to wind up as another dead end and I've seen two waves of crypto Innovation wind up in dead ends the only thing that survived in crypto from crypto in the 1990s even though we had fully functioned digital currencies the only thing that survived from crypto in the 1990s was e-commerce and e-commerce did not fundamentally make the world a better place it made it more convenient but it did not improve it right the second big wave of crypto Innovation you know all the stuff that happened you know uh sorry the first big wave all the stuff that happened with secure Communications does anybody feel like their Communications are genuinely secure nope you don't trust the software you're using you don't trust the hardware most of that Innovation was also lost right so if we're going to make this round of crypto Innovation stick if we're going to get the power of these are my keys nobody else can pretend to need and nobody else can read my coms if we're going to make that stick we have to change our values right we have to go back to the original vision of ethereum we have to focus on the incorruptibility more than the decentralization and we have to have to absolutely stop tolerating the scams um and you know you see somebody on stage pitching something that you think is a scam you let people know um I guess that'll do thank you

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End of [564] Vinay Gupta at 'A Decade of #Ethereum'. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [45](https://guptaoption.com/texts/45.md) PERMANENT SUMMER: THE NEW MATR TOKEN…And Why The RWA... (2024); the most closely related, [783](https://guptaoption.com/texts/783.md) Vinay Gupta / DCxPrague (2023); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.