# The economic impact of blockchain - Panel at the second Internet of Agreements conference

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [631]. 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, 2018-04-16 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I89-9irZogw. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Developing-world export and energy finance cases, close to the SEZ-export idea.
- 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)
  - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (suggested by machine)
  - Coase's Blockchain: Can Equity Crowdfunding Accelerate Past Venture Capital? (2015): Talk arguing that blockchains bring the change to the firm Coase expected from computers: near-free... (suggested by machine)
  - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine)
  - A Blockchain Solution For Identity? (2017): Keynote to the Dutch Blockchain Coalition (BC3) at Techruption: insurance as the way to make different... (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)
- 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: Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (45%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: M-PESA (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); SEC (2 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); ICO (2 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); world trade (1 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); peer-to-peer (1 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); India (2 here; 88 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); supply chain (1 here; 92 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); markets (1 here; 159 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 6 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.14 (1.00 is the top), number 438 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [791] [COP26 Event: Green Blockchain, Green Economy (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/791.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
  - [678] [WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with Vinay Gupta (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/678.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
- On the same works, just before: [633] [Mattereum panel at the Internet of Agreements conference (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/633.md); [632] Law and Global Trade in the Era of Blockchain (2018); [835] [10 Apr 18 Identity – Internet of Agreements (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/835.md)
- On the same works, just after: [630] Michael Mainelli - "The economic impact on world trade... (2018); [629] Blockchain In The Manufacturing Supply Chain (2018); [166] Rob Knight — on the Internet of Agreements project | by... (2018)

## 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 economic impact of blockchain - Panel at the second Internet of Agreements conference, video, 2018-04-16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I89-9irZogw; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [631], https://guptaoption.com/texts/631.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I89-9irZogw&t=0s) my name is Jason brink I work on various blockchain projects one of the projects I'm working on right now is called data blossom it's Internet of Things oriented and that was fantastic my name is Dan Bates I work with impact PPA and we provide renewable energy to developing nations served and to end from generation all the way through payment my name is matthew shootie I work on a project called hollow chain which is an alternative to blockchain we're a way of building peer-to-peer applications using just the devices of the users themselves no mining no cryptocurrency etc my name is Gwen lei I'm from VIN copy we are developing a cross-border commodity trading platform felicitate facilitating trade between in Africa so one of the first that we're looking to do is to tabata using smarter smart battery mechanism between Vietnam and Ghana rice cup on rice going from Vietnam and cashew nuts going from Ghana without the use of US Dollars Richard Colden I share various companies but the main card that I normally hand out is Black Swan PLC which is my own investment company our company motto is quote from Bernard Shaw people who say it cannot be done I should get out of the way of those who are actually doing it good what I'd like to do in the sense of trade might might be modest but the trade is only one component and some of things you're talking about doing are making new things possible actually get the impact on the trader of the use of the new technology being diviner but there could everybody just quickly knock off what do you think the biggest economic impact area is of these smart Legends I think that the biggest area for growth and actually one of the biggest there that's going to be impacted growing going forward is the ability to aggregate and analyze large amounts of data right now we're working on not not me personally but we are working on putting together systems that will

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I89-9irZogw&t=150s) collect analyzed using big data using various analytical mechanisms data on every area of our life every device that we have is connected everything is networked and there's a tremendous amount of data there to be analyzed and used and I think that that's going to be able to allow us to increase our efficiencies in other areas as well and I'm gonna go with the developing world we we supply renewable energy systems to places where they don't have energy it's either non-existent or inconsistent and lack of identity is a big issue around there for people in rural India rural Africa so we're able to supply renewable energy to these folks delivered through smart apps that give them identity for the first time where there are unbanked unconnected so that's a market that we're really focused on right now I think the real big thing that's going to shift is economics more generally I think right now we do a lot of accounting in a very simple system of dollars or euros or pounds and these cryptographic communication systems enable us to pay attention to other signals they'll enable new forms of accounting that actually allow the communities to self steer far better than they do now but it's a shift in the accounting it's a shift in what we pay attention to so for me I can only talk in terms of different countries when people talk about blockchain and supply chain a lot of attention has been paid to improving efficiencies you know digitizing paper-based processes and these tends to be beneficial for big companies but for companies in developing countries the ability to be able to trade directly with counterparties in other country without going through intermediaries that would be hugely beneficial and I will give some example but also the use of US dollars in international trade without having anything to do with trading with the US is actually creating a lot of frictions and costs for this developing country so

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I89-9irZogw&t=300s) coming back today to the example of exporting cashew nuts from West Africa to Vietnam Vietnam every year export billion dollars of rice to West Africa and import billions dollar of cashew nuts and cotton and timber and so on but the trading is actually just happening just going through chesa feet probably less than ten large traders so the ability for SME is to be able to trade directly will basically level the playing field and this would be the profit more evenly and ultimately we'll be able to offer more higher price for for farmers so those are the real benefits that we see as well as improving the access and the cost of financing because these are really high in those developing countries well I'm afraid everybody's almost made all my points because I definitely go with the developing world as well I'm so old that I remember looking at plans to cable up Africa and it's laughable now we're gonna go back the telecoms coming aboard how are we gonna put it over the mountain well we'll have to put it all on the road or something nobody was thinking well maybe a new technology is going to come along like mochi probe our phones and even when those arrived nobody actually saw that it was a banking instrument until M paisa was launched so I think the real benefit with this technology is something that nobody in this room has thought of yet and that's that's what will actually be be the killer because face it with personal computers you know i-i've course bought an apple too but as I had to that the killer app was VisiCalc and that was actually something that made it useful and at that point everyone goes and buys one I didn't what happened to VisiCalc actually but I don't still have a copy so in this case I think that where the impact will happen in the third world is taking it down to the smaller level where people don't understand what a forward market is we were looking at something in one Asian country that I can't name where the government what farmers to have the ability effectively to sell their crops forward so markets and restaurants know when the carrots are going to arrive they know when the meat is going to

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I89-9irZogw&t=450s) arrive and they can help finance the trade now that's a perfect a smart contract financial blockchain transaction well that's a that's actually a pretty good theme what do you think of Richards assertion that this is really effectively a leap frogging proposition so we view blockchain may have the ability like mobile phone for developing countries especially Africa so up until probably 10-15 years ago Africa is basically impossible to to communicate with Africa because they don't have a very develop telecommunication network no fixed phone but now everyone in Africa has has a phone so we we develop agriculture projects in Africa for another in another business and even people in a very very more places in Africa they have the access to the phone may be a very simple phone so with that that also create a lot of financial products such as m-pesa in Kenya so we saw block has the potential to actually improve the financial infrastructure for these developing countries because if you're looking at a payment going out Africa regardless of you know hundreds of banks in Africa but ultimately it's going through banks one is Standard Chartered and the other one is Citibank and every time this payment going through then is in u.s. dollars you get routed to to to New York so here is about to create this financial infrastructure that will enable a larger segment of society to be benefit from from this innovation so I've been working in the rural areas of Africa in India for about a decade now supplying renewable energy products to them and bringing the blockchain into what I have been doing historically is just a game changer for the way we address the need of the people out of

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I89-9irZogw&t=600s) these rural areas so imagine if you will we've got these micro grids now that are set up that are connected to smart meters whether they're through existing copper wires or we have to sometimes stream them but that's a different issue EP seas do that work but you've got a blockchain driven smart meter that people can now address on a cell phone right so it's no different than what they're already used to and pace it I think we heard yesterday know 70% of the transactions in Africa are done through amp ASA a cell phone interconnected device right so we install these smart meters which then become sort of like the OS right so you can have layered services on top of renewable energy now internet connectivity all sorts of other things that are capable right water pumping cold food storage whatever you need we are just a base layer that apps can now sit on top of we are we become the payment channel which opens up a whole variety opportunity in the developing world and that's something that I think is really exciting and reducing cost providing additional services that's what makes the blockchain looks where I'm doing right now if I may I just want to add in a little tiny comment I think one of the things that makes these technologies so powerful in the long run is that they're based on voluntary participation you don't have necessarily a centralized Authority that's issuing them you know farmers can participate in the developing economies by deciding to sign up so there's a lot of voluntary participation and then there's also an element of extra nationality to it they can spread across borders very easily in ways that more traditional financial systems cannot which allows you know movement of pistachios or cashews and things like that so I think that's pretty cool who might turn to another question Matt Matthew they're kind of trying to do an alternative to things how important is the panel feel I mean I made a fairly strong statement I don't think I think there's a lot of there's a lot of activity that might get fostered when we're able to do payments that are actually micro payments as you had pointed out in your talk that's not at all with the blockchain architecture

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I89-9irZogw&t=750s) enables it also doesn't actually enable distributed systems I love the work that you guys are aiming to do and the first thing that pops into my mind is if I'm in a rural context and there is some power disconnection does that suddenly mean I'm not able to interact locally because I don't have a access to some global blockchain and there are there are alternatives and I think some of the systems that you brought up in some systems we're working on are actually distributed systems so they don't need to talk to the global ledger in order to have interaction become possible but the yeah I'll leave it there the one thing I do want to like I totally agree with the point about what we call mutual and he referred to as mutuality that that hey you and I want to play a game okay we can play that game and if it's not working for me I can play a different game and I think the really exciting architectures are the ones where I can still keep playing this game with you but I can also start going and playing a different game as well and so we're able to start extending the sense-making that's available and it's actually it becomes a user centred architecture as opposed to an application centred architecture and that's the big shift for me I think that's the big difference between the world today which is the world of applications where we run into an out of apps and a world of Biscay an ecosystem where you actually have users at the middle bridging between these different social contexts there's the comment that it's standard than sharted and the payments go through it and they go through new york dinosaur-like that is going to have its head chopped off and one of the ways that's going to happen is Bob diamonds Bank Atlas Mara hands up in this room who has heard about this Mara okay if we do this in two years time first of all anyone who's in standard and chartered won't be here because they'll be redundant and everyone else will have stuck their hand up and what Bob Diamond is doing is consolidating bad african banks he said it's going to take him three to five years but if he has any reasonable track record which he does I think it'll probably take two to three and what he's trying to do is to transform banking in Africa which is a component part of the payments so when

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I89-9irZogw&t=900s) you've got a pacer doing the small claimants if you had a pan-african bank financing African trade that is going to be the most staggering winner because it doesn't need to charge the prices that the existing banks - Chandra at the very low level - I actually live in Thailand most of the time and at a very low level these banking fees are crippling to small farmers and having the ability to have micro transactions with sub cent fees is absolutely critical to the growth of the economy because you know if you're talking 3% of a dollar it's significant but you know if it's only half a cent then that makes things a lot better it's a lot more money moving around in the ecosystem well I'll make one last comment there I'm not a big fan of tokens we don't really use tokens in architecture but instead of payments I would I would try to push towards recognition because vir there are various ways in which people can recognize contributions it is not necessarily a payment there's ways in which you can recognize activity then that recognition fosters a flow of that type of activity and it's that sort of mutual hey we're gonna recognize these types of behaviors or somebody's going to speak that that's what they saw you do you gave them this thing and that moves it away from an industrial sort of architecture of banking centric architecture and towards something that actually can be much more period up here well I would echo that completely you take away the work to know what my net is that's the same thing and once I wanted it my net payment is a different thing entirely and I think what people who come to this sector don't understand it were they even to get that going at the micro payment they would destroy the credit systems and that's a scary thing it's not that fun saying that they need to be preserved because they exist but it's not a straightforward is that a lot of these things I'm going to put all of the the ether into the smart contract to do the insurance payment just simply doesn't work you obviated pooling or you have to create a whole bunch of money I think to put all this stuff into my smart contract well then I've got to have outrageous amounts of credit funding where the hell is that going to come from so these things don't even stack up economically but you know I read the coin sites as well well look with the last panel and I thought you know you're all right people you can help the

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I89-9irZogw&t=1050s) audience could you each just a tell me the one big thing that you know changed your mind today or gave you a new insight I'll start with you I think one of the things in listening to everyone that people are missing is transaction speed and transaction cost and you've raised it but I think you know rush through it slightly because none of the cryptocurrencies are currencies because they can't really be used to buy your vanilla latte and I think transaction speed was one of the issues the other is a lot of people said well of course this won't work on a public blockchain which immediately begs the issue of where you're going to get the blockchain from from personal experience I know that there are blockchains and blockchains electro Neum that a friend of mine invested in ICO two hours it took to hack the blockchain that they'd scribbled on the back of a coffee tin so there are pitfalls that that people aren't seeing but I think most of the people of this conference today have seen them thank you so when I first learned about blockchain about a year ago and started reading materials one thing that came to to my attention was what they call the fad protocol within within the blockchain world saying that people building protocols who will benefit more in terms of value culture comparing to people building applications and we are now building applications so they'll be scared the reality is unless the blockchain space have real application that changed people's life then the whole place is a bit of a Ponzi scheme people are just hoping that ultimately there will be some kind of killer applications that will affect people's life and change so for us and and for us implementing something quite simple like payment making mechanism when we talk to authorities in Vietnam in Africa they

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I89-9irZogw&t=1200s) they tell us you don't even mention crypto currencies because we don't want to hear about that we would like to hear about a bit more about blockchain and how that can affect so it's incredibly difficult to bring the legacy economy into the blockchain world whereas for the people in the room who are very committed to blockchain things that that transition can make can happen very quickly so I agree with your analysis that the benefit might be small but also the benefit might take a long time to deliver as well there was a comment and a conversation that happened during the first panel this morning around trust full versus trust less and there was a fair bit of interesting conversation there and for me the idea of trust as if it's a single thing as silly as if you did these actions and now you are more trust me that's not at all what actually trust is about it's and I completely feel that we are shifting where Trust is held and how we're handling predictiveness and our sense of certainty about something but it's always contextual if I'm trying to go eat at a restaurant the kinds of information that I care about are the sources that I trust are different than when I'm trying to order lumber or look for a babysitter and the mutual sort of systems it will enable parties to pay attention to the signals that are relevant for them and so that for me I get really excited about the building up of trustful systems as opposed to trustless systems for me I'm rather new to the whole thing so there's you know a lot of you who have been doing it much longer than I so I'm sort of a newbie in the world for last 9 10 months or so and I see a lot of stuff going through that whole ICO pipe that some of its great some of its awesome some of it's just unbelievable crap and you look at this you go oh my god it's like the dot-com thing all over again we've all experienced that at the end of the day I think the whole concept of blockchain and what it can do for social impact what it can do

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I89-9irZogw&t=1350s) for community and Trust and identity is what's great about it but at the end of the day there's got to be some fundamentals under it so there's got to be a business it's like the old days of the.com the guy walking down you know I'm from California Sunset Boulevard with a wheelbarrow full of money you've just throwing it out there you got to go what is he gonna do when he runs out because there's no financial underpinning to a lot of the companies that I'm saying I'm sure there are many that are awesome and they're great they're gonna be survivors but we're gonna run into this nuclear winter of blockchain with all of these really crappy companies and the ones that are you know fundamentally sound are gonna survive and then it'll be the dawn again but I want to see companies they just go do it make money for their token holders their investors whatever the SEC allows us to call them right and and survive and push it forward no more faith trust and pixie dust yeah yeah I am a I'm honored to be the last person speaking here that's kind of cool anyway one of the things that I take away from all of this and this geckos what many of you guys have said up here today is that we need to pay attention to the fundamentally non-monetary applications of blockchain technology when it comes to data when it comes to identity verification when it comes to creating trustful societies I like that term English is awful for explaining some of these things but I think that taking away the the fact that we can use this technology for so much more than oh I'm going to send someone money it's not about money it's about the broader deeper applications of these technologies in every area of our lives and I think that's where the big change is going to come when we stop looking at things as quote/unquote crypto currencies and begin looking at them as tools for moving information in closing I'd like to say a few remarks if I might the first thing I'd point out is they'll expect to me it's really about my IB theory of technology for a long time I used to write about 40% of UK and one things I found there was no new technology takes a very long time

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I89-9irZogw&t=1500s) that's really the financial sector you're not gonna demolish it you might strangle it it's going to take a long time but you're not that's just there's virtually no example of that in any of the technological stuff if you ever look at the second thing I point out is that that implies and I think we were getting there as well then it's the new areas that are going to be exciting it's what this enables us to do that we're not doing as opposed to what we are doing to be better something and that would justify some of the findings here on the relatively mild impact on existing types of trading systems and that is also in line with the leap frogging comments you made about developing country - this is a place potentially below it certainly to favor if you're trying to do some type of selection matrix and I think it was interesting to see that I couldn't get much pushback on its being somewhat friends there so identity documentation and agreements I might also take out an ad for for two things if you're interested in our wider research program I also brought that along but I wasn't supposed to advertise but it's sitting here it's not really advertising just tells you what we're doing and what's coming up it's just here on the bottom of the podium and the second thing is to show to point something out to you that you may not be aware of but in April on the 16th 17th and 18th of April 52 leaders and Commonwealth are coming to London one of their major items on Monday the 16th is in fact what distributed ledger is smart Ledger's world trade and so a lot of people are looking at but those of you who understand how the Commonwealth is structured of course these are really coming largely in the developing world probably at least as much interest as the government gap saying about SEC or FCA the Japanese regulating or not regulating crypto currencies I think it'd be really neat if the trading systems the Commonwealth we're putting behind it for countries so then a man thank you very much for the opportunity I think the panelists for coming up and supporting me here it's been great six of us managed to do it

---
End of [631] The economic impact of blockchain - Panel at the second Internet of Agreements conference. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [630] Michael Mainelli - "The economic impact on world trade... (2018) (no text here); the most closely related, [791](https://guptaoption.com/texts/791.md) COP26 Event: Green Blockchain, Green Economy (2021); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.