# Interview with Vinay Gupta by Paul Tanasyuk | Blockchain, Identity, Resilience and Social Order

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [693]. 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, 2017-03-11 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZeV75Wa0k. Text: automatic captions, uncorrected
- 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): Jurisdiction-as-a-product idea relevant to SEZ and camp legal status.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out of ideas (2010): One-page paper: the richest fifth are eating the planet, so the next economy has to be at peace with other... (suggested by machine)
  - Blind in the Panopticon: The decreasing marginal utility of access to information as an aspect of cyber policy (2012): Cyber policy essay: past a point, more surveillance data has negative value, because a state can collect... (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)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - cyber and defense: Security work for defense clients, built on one idea: set rivals to check each other. Resilience and Opportunity in... (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: Equity crowdfunding & venture capital (27%); Rural poverty & development infrastructure (13%); ESCROWNYM / cryptographic ethics / People’s Cloud (13%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: IoT (2 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Singapore (4 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); Goat Rodeo (2 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 3 undated); science fiction (3 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Plan B (1 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); consumerism (1 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); The DAO (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); equity crowdfunding (1 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); life extension (1 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Iraq (2 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.26 (1.00 is the top), number 306 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [231] [Chit Chat With the Nightmare Destroyer (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/231.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
  - [702] [Conversation With Pat Kane & Vinay Gupta (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/702.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
- On the same works, just before: [734] [Blockchain: Beyond Bitcoin by Vinay Gupta @leashless... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/734.md); [7] [Capital Partners transcript, August 2016 (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/7.md); [237] [The Internet of Agreements (Hexayurt Capital section,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/237.md)
- On the same works, just after: [691] [Vinay Gupta (Part 2) by Paul Tanasyuk | Blockchain,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/691.md); [834] [A Blockchain Solution for Identity? – Internet of Agreements (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/834.md); [744] [Vinay Gupta - Hexayurt Capital - World Blockchain Forum (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/744.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: Interview with Vinay Gupta by Paul Tanasyuk | Blockchain, Identity, Resilience and Social Order, video, 2017-03-11, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZeV75Wa0k; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [693], https://guptaoption.com/texts/693.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZeV75Wa0k&t=0s) Hello. It's um thank you for hosting us here. It's a pleasure, Mai. Um I would like to ask you a few questions. Some of them would be personal questions about your life, what you do, and also I'd like to touch upon um our society that we live in and how blockchain technology can potentially shape our society and what dangers and risk it might have or maybe solve. Right now I'm in the kind of middle of setting up a new VC fund. Yes. Um and uh we are hoping to invest in what you talk about as intersectional technologies places where you see for example uh artificial intelligence and virtual reality will have crossing points or uh drones might have crossing points with the internet of things for example. So we want to find places where there are uh areas of technology where there are big platform investments which are being made by lots and lots and lots of companies uh like the IoT movement or the VR movement lots of different investments uh and then find places where these large kind of suites kind of come into contact and focus on the bridge building and the interfaces. A very interesting idea so I can see that you're quite different from other funds which are focusing. So do you have a horizon in mind how your fund is going to be structured and run in? Um well I mean we want to try and concentrate the risk in the technologies that we're investing in rather than in the fund structure. So there was a lot of discussion about whether we should do something along the lines of crowdfund uh and take up some of the slack left by the DAO. Mhm. Um but my feeling is that if you're making uh you know bold bets on new technology, you don't also want to be making bold bets on how you're raising your fund. Yeah. Right. You're basically doubling down on risk. Uh and I kind of feel like the trick is to take one big risk at a time. So if you were investing in fairly ordinary technology, we might do an exotic fund raise, but if we're investing in very radical technology, we won't don't want to do an exotic fund raise as well. Um although uh regulators are getting increasingly friendly to things like equity crowdfunding and at such time as the regulators become fully settled with that. I think that's something we'd be very interested in. It's interesting to know what is your risk approach when you talk to startups and trying to understand their business models. How do you mitigate the risks that every startup intrinsically has? Um I don't think the right approach is to mitigate the risk. Um because obviously

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZeV75Wa0k&t=150s) there are there are stupid ways of dying, right? You know, you don't want to stand outside in the cold and the rain and you know you know there are just a bunch of dumb things you don't want to do, right? Yes. Like you should know your burn rate, all this kind of stuff. Uh on the other hand, the vast majority of startups are doomed from the beginning, right? They're like those little turtles which are running towards the sea. Yeah. And you know that you know one in a thousand is going to turn into some kind of enormous world changing thing. Maybe five in a thousand will turn into billion-dollar companies. Uh but the vast majority of them are going to die on the beach. So really for most of the startups, death is certain and doing stupidly risky things as you charge down the beach doesn't increase your risk of death. It only increases your risk of success, right? Because your default state is dead. Um so I I look at this as being uh largely about having fallback positions, right? The people involved in a startup need to know what happens after the startup fails because it's almost certain the startup will fail. You got a 99 95% chance of failure. 90% chance of failure. So, if you personally know that after it fails, you have a job waiting for you or you're very employable or you've got 6 months of money in the bank and you can go do something else, then you can play bold, risky, high power strategy all the way through the process and when you finally hit the wall, you go back to whatever plan B was. But what kills most startups is that they are conservative in the ways where they should be radical and as a result they don't take enough of the aggressive risks which are required to increase their chance of making it down the beach. So I can see that your risk profile is somewhat different from other risk profiles that you might find here in the UK. Well, I mean everybody in VC talks about wanting to take risks, but in truth the vast majority of the people in VC don't understand the technology well enough to have any real feel for the future, right? They're finance people and finance people are notoriously next, you know, quarter driven and you have to get that level right or you go bankrupt before you've had a chance to change the world. But you could get that level right and still wind up asme which for a VC firm is simply losing money, right? VC time and you know batting for the horizon and really trying to shift the world using technology requires people to do things which are very very risky. Yeah. So I, you know, I did a lot of reading on VC over maybe the past five years because it was obvious that it was a model that was 40 years old, right? It goes back a long long long way. Everybody seemed to hate VC like really hate it. Nobody likes it as an

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZeV75Wa0k&t=300s) industry. Yes. And that told me that there was something fundamentally wrong in what was happening. And basically what it boils down to is the wrong people are doing VC, right? There was a point where VC was largely done by tech people that had made a bunch of money and had an excellent intuition for the technology. Then increasingly they were displaced as a professionalizing finance people came in and the finance people basically approach VC um more or less in the same way that realtors or recruiters uh approach um finding you a house or finding you a hire. They don't really understand what they're doing. They've never built a house. They've never written a line of code. So they come into this whole thing where the primary uh tool that they have for getting the deal done is bluff. Oh yeah, we really understand this technology. This is so disruptive. It's really amazing. It's like, you know, if I go out of the room and come back 20 minutes later and ask you to describe what we do, do you remember? Do you have you actually internalized it or is it basically just product? And the thing is, nobody likes buying just product and nobody likes feeling like they're just product. You want to be working with people that really understand what you're doing. So I think that a lot of the VC world has been basically treating startups like product. Not having the deep technical feel, not having a clear world model about what will succeed or what will fail, not having clearly defined politics, which is incredibly important. I mean Uber is political, Google is incredibly political, Facebook is incredibly political. Um, you know, you can't avoid that kind of stuff. And that doesn't fit inside of the relatively sterile box that VCs attempt to abstract the game down to. You know, I I come out of a defense, security, and resilience background. So for me, I really understand that, you know, technology shapes the world in which policy then occurs and that this is a fluid interface and it's moving increasingly rapidly. Anything which is going to make it to kind of unicorn status, which is going to really really move the dial, uh, is going to have political implications. and that doesn't fit inside of this kind of product ecology, right? You you need much deeper understanding and you need a much more kuro defined perspective to make this stuff go. Very interesting approach definitely different from most of the VCs here in the UK. This is the but maybe you can also tell us what would you what would be the key evolation points in terms of awaiting prospects startups that you're going to invest into. Well, I mean so the intersection thing is the core idea, right? If you're working in a position where you have a company which spans two, three, four of these fundamental platforms, then in all probability you get a certain amount of

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZeV75Wa0k&t=450s) uplift simply because you're sitting on top of $20 billion of other people's money. And that's kind of a good place to be, right? If you have a prototype which uses VR and AI together and it kind of sort of works now, if you do nothing other than keep your prototype up to date, 3 years from now the VR will be unrecognizably better. 3 years from now the AI will be unrecognizably better. and you get enormous amounts of uplift for just being there and keeping your stuff working. So things which are just kind of sort of okay now that use these commodity platforms will be spectacularly good in a few years and we know that that will happen because we're basically making strategy up an exponential curve. Very interesting point and actually you touched upon the technology that it's constantly evolves. It's not something which is stable. we almost um so do we actually live in a modern society? Can you say that we live in a modern world or because technology is constantly evolving it's not something that we can actually say? Well, do you know the um guy William Gibson, science fiction author? So Gibson says the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. Uh so in this house we went out and bought basically one of everything that was kind of frontline consumer new technology. So there's a robot which vacuums the floor. There's a VR system and there's a simple IoT system. And all of this stuff is on, you know, you buy it off Amazon. You don't need to go to some weird little supplier. It's just there for the having. You plug it in, you turn it all on. And people come into the house and play with the equipment. And there's a point where they're just like, wait a minute, you know, 25 year olds who are looking at this stuff like, I didn't know this was possible. Yeah, it's possible. When did it become possible? year ago, 6 months ago. You know, these things are two or three years old, but they're not something that the culture is lagging behind the technology. So, people don't really understand that VR went from being basically tomorrow's technology to being actually here now and it works. The Microsoft hollow lens, you put this on people's heads, they stare in wonder. It's like science fiction. How the heck does this work? Well, it's a computer on your head and it's got a screen. Oh, and so that wow, so are you talking about a new digital divide in a way because it's been evolving so fast even in a western society which actually currently occurs. So I don't think of it as being a digital divide. I think of it as being lag, right? Culture takes a long time to change. Is it a good thing this lag? Um I don't really think it's a good thing or a bad thing, right? It's just a fact

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZeV75Wa0k&t=600s) of nature, right? I mean, you know, like it rains or it's sunny. Human nature takes time to adopt uh and to climatize the new ideas. Humans are I don't want to say they're innately conservative, but culture is innately conservative. So here you talk about innovation and as you said innovation needs time to be adopted by people and not maybe not all of them will sort of get uh used in the future. It cuts a little deeper, right? So you bring in 25-year-olds who you would think would be fully adapted to the present, right? They're young, right? And they get disorientation when they encounter consumer goods they haven't seen before. And I mean consumer goods, right? There's nothing esoteric about Amazon's Alexa. They are selling the heck out of that thing at every opportunity. Yes. You know, you go into Amazon, you'll see four adverts for on the front page alone. It's it's not wild and radical new stuff, but you actually get into a position where people are interacting for the first time and they go through an event horizon. It's like, well, this is science fiction, right? Something that was impossible is now in front of me. I don't really know how to relate to it. People compulsively play with these things and poke them and try and figure out what their limits are. And what we're seeing is this kind of constantly moving event horizon between the possible and the impossible. And the line is now moving so quickly that nobody understands where the line is. And here that's the new phenomena. It's very interesting actually point that but how do you differentiate what is innovation and what is per consumerism? Where is the line between a new tablet and something which is truly innovative? We we can't tell right. I mean, you know, Airbnb at the time looked like a cheap alternative to hotel, right? But what it's turned out to do is completely change the way that, for example, the route was global nomad functions because you can Airbnb your way through a kind of second tier city for the same price as paying rent a year at a time in a first tier city. Yeah. So, you make a very small lifestyle adjustment and all of a sudden you're completely dislocated in space and you can go anywhere you like on the same budget that you were going to spend staying at home if you stayed in New York. um nobody would have foreseen the cultural change that would come out of making accommodation a little bit cheaper and a little more fluid. Same thing with Uber. You know, it used to be infeasibly expensive to take a black cab 3/4 of the way across London with a bunch of people at 2:00 in the morning cuz you were coming back from a party. There were people that were just far away that I never saw except in a work context because they socialized in places that it would cost me £75 to get back from. You bring Uber

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZeV75Wa0k&t=750s) into that equation, I see way more of my friends than I would otherwise. And these are tiny little shifts but the cumulative social impact of that is enormous. Do you believe that it also has effect on the cultural differences? So we don't have just one uh point to start with but we have different cross referencing points terms of the cultural structures in society and what potential effects it has uh on risk for example. Well this I think is social media right? So the fragmentation of reality that's occurring particularly in America because of social media is staggering. Yes. And in Europe, we've always had that fracturing of reality because we had different language groups. Everybody understood that the German speaking press reported the story differently from the English speaking press. What nobody understood was that the West Coast press and the Texas press had similar differences. We didn't really understand that America was fractured because they all had one language and social media has brought those fractures into full visibility. Uh that one frankly scares the pants off me. Uh because if we can't agree on the facts, how are we going to make decisions together? And if we can't make decisions together, how do we hold society together? So u about society um for example Bowman was saying that it has become liquid. Do you believe that technologies like blockchain can potentially bring some structures back into society and if yes is it a good thing? how it would change the relationship between the agency, human agency and institution. When we're in this position of you know continual dislocation, we are constantly in a position where we're having to adapt to changes that for previous generations of humans might be once a lifetime. Yeah. And now it's once every 3 years. Yes. Um I think that we are on the last real round of pure digital innovation. You know, I think we're going to get as far as uh one to three global AI companies and just about every device has an artificial intelligence interface in it and most of it will be driven by voice. Uh I think you'll see blockchain like structures used for more or less all tracking, all management, most finance. Yes. And that in a sense I think is where digital technology stops because the biotech guys are coming right along behind us. And the biotech guys first trick is going to be that nearly all of the people that are currently in wheelchairs get up and walk, right? Spinal injuries fixed, blindness fixed, deafness fixed. And then their second trick is going to be doubling human lifespan. And I think that you're going

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZeV75Wa0k&t=900s) to see that within 20 to 30 years. So if we think the cultural dislocations from technology in the digital domain where it's outside of the body are weird, wait until we see similar exponential increase in function inside of the body. And the obvious stuff is life extension and healing of physical injury. The non-obvious stuff might leave us completely flabbergasted. And I I have no horse in the biotech race. I don't understand biotech. I have no feel for it. I'm a digital guy. So I view this as being the last generation in which my class will be for waterfront and I'm going to do as well as I can in that round. I'm going to try and change the world as much as I can in that round. But I'm very aware that 15 years from now I'm going to be a fossil, right? I'll be 60 years old. the biotech guys will be changing the world. The digital guys will be completely retro and I'm going to be a museum piece. And knowing that this is kind of the last round of pure digital innovation because the digital is practically finished. We can see the point where it reaches its apotheiois and its apex. Um is very humbling. You know, like I don't buy the myth that it's going to be computer programming for the win all the way through. We've got one more round of that stuff. It'll take a generation. And at the end of that generation, the biotech guys will say, "How would you like another 30 years of life, sir?" And the digital guys would be like, "Well, we've got this amazing helmet." And it's like, "Come on." Right. Yes. Where is the cutting edge now? What about social relationship? I mean, in terms of duality of human agency in institution, do you believe that um actually in the future it would be less socially constructed because the objective truth would be out there maybe stored somewhere on the blockchain. So human agents would be less powerful in constructing their own reality. So I used to say I don't fear the state. I fear that the state will collapse before we have a meaningful alternative. Um can you name a competent institution that operates in Europe or America? The Singaporean government is a competent institution. All the people that I met were incredibly sharp. They worked together in very effective teams. They had a really clear vision of what their jobs were. And dealing with them, it was just like this wall of competence. They never talked about anything other than solving their society's problems. And they were bright, they were efficient, they were diligent. I had never seen anything like it. I didn't think that was possible for government. I had no notion that a state could function that way. Um, and prior to that, I had always thought that this was a myth, that the state was inherently broken. I went there, I saw a state that worked. And

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZeV75Wa0k&t=1050s) you know, you can make your arguments for or against the way that the single Koreans have done things, but as an example of a genuinely effective 21st century institution, it was the first one that I ever had contact with because every other institution that I deal with where I know a bunch of smart people in the institution, the smart people in the institution spend most of their time bitching about how terrible the institution is. We can't get anything done. Our hands are tied. The bureaucracy has its own way of doing things. We're 20 years in the past. There's a standard list of complaints that the smart people in institutions have. And in Singapore, what I saw was the smart people in institutions were comfortably and confidently in charge. We have an effective meritocracy, the smart people in charge. We've got enough hierarchy that we can give instructions and get things done. It all works great for us. Do you believe that people will be still in charge of running um the country and running the processes behind most of the institutions or it will be more automated, more digitalized in a way that we don't have to intervene and make daily decisions about certain things? Um my belief is that rate of change has destroyed the institution as a structure. Okay. Um, the fact that I've only ever had personal contact with one genuinely effective institution um, makes me think that basically the institution as a form is dying because of rate of change. And if you can't keep up to date with what's happening, you can't take effective action because you're always acting on models that are 10, 15, 20 years out of date. Yes. Uh, government, right? I mean, you know, unless it's black little heart for your electoral democracy is a 300-y old template. The idea that you vote once every four years and that you then send a representative to go and do your bidding. Every single thing in our society has changed out of all recognition from 300 years ago except for the ballot box. And the fact that process would be completely recognizable to, you know, Benjamin Franklin ought to tell us that we're doing something wrong. We should have updated the machinery of democracy every time we got new technology. We should have updated a telephone. We should have updated a telegraph. We should have updated our radio. We should have updated it with the uh first computer revolution. Every step we should have updated the machinery of democracy to be the best available solution for the society we had and we didn't do that. When you say the machinery, do you mean the engagement of people? Um well, so democracy is meant to be about representing the will of the people and we've got much better mechanisms for doing that now than we had 300 years ago. We just don't use them. So what we

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZeV75Wa0k&t=1200s) have is 300 years of builtup lag between the technical possibility for representing the will of the people and the uh technical reality of it. Yes. So if we'd updated the democratic structure, the democratic form every 50 or 60 years, new technology comes in, we make a small adjustment. New technology comes in, we make a small adjustment. We could have continually fine-tuned for more and more and more popular engagement over time. So you said about um voting and giving more opportunities for people to interact with government to be able to express what they really think. But in order to do that um people need to have access to information and the information and the BS that you have behind information is something which can alter that decision made on the level of uh population. So how do I avoid that and how blockchain technology can potentially help us with that or maybe there is also risk associated with blockchain technology as well? Well, so the way that I see this is that we cannot expect people to make informed decisions because the world is moving too fast for anybody to be informed. Right. If you try and follow a complete understanding of the available signal, yes, right, it's not going to happen. Right. You've got access to, you know, 25,000 newspapers in 600 languages or something like that. I'm making these numbers up, but you know what I mean. So, you could build a pretty comprehensive understanding of how the world operates. You could get firsthand reports from an enormous number of events because people are there with cameras and you could synthesize a fairly accurate world model on that basis. The problem is that one day's feed would take you 2 or 3 years to process. So, we're in a position where we've got enormous access to information, but we have very little access to synthesis except by filtering. We throw out practically everything. We hire somebody to do our thinking for us and then we get on with our day-to-day decision- making. Yes. So the problem is no longer information scarcity. It's synthesis pro uh imposs the impossibility of synthesis. And when you talk about synthesis um then obviously we have a question about quantitative and qualitative information. And it's much easier to make your decisions and to narrow them down if you have quantitative information. But maybe the most valuable one is the one which brings the context. How do you solve that problem? And do you see that AI for example or blockchain will help us to solve those problems? As we are right now, uh I don't think it's possible to

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZeV75Wa0k&t=1350s) solve the problem. Right? We're in a position where we've simply got more information than a human being can process and it's being added to more quickly uh than even teams of human beings can process. So I seem to remember that you know YouTube has something like 2 years of video uploaded every hour or something crazy like this might be 10 times that might be 100 times that um and in that position how are we supposed to sense make this infinite stream of information right and the answer is we can't right you you have this enormous river and you have some kind of skeletal macro narrative you've got some kind of sketch on the back of an envelope that you use to interpret the river that goes past you. Yes. And it's only when you get constant feedback that the sketch you have on the back of an envelope is totally inaccurate that you begin to modify it because human beings cling to their ideas long after the data has changed because of this lag factor between taking in information and changing our minds. So do you believe in objective truth yourself? Um there are certainly things that you can measure objectively. So the scientific method for example is a pretty decent mechanism for defining objective truth inside of the hard sciences. Right? social sciences. I think there are some real problems. The the whole weird thesis that most of the social science studies were done on westerners and turns out they don't generalize for the rest of the world. That kind of stuff important. But basically uh outside of a laboratory setting where you're replicating an experiment, it's extraordinarily difficult to nail down objective truth particularly when you cross a language barrier. So if an event happens and almost everybody involved is a Russian speaker and you try and get an objective representation of that event into English, you're automatically going to lose a whole bunch of the context of what happened inside of people's heads because of the superior horror hypothesis. Yes. Right. Your language representation, my language representation are different because our native tongues are different. Um so it's not that there is no objective truth. There's plenty of objective truth out there in a lab context. But as soon as we get into the interpretation of human affairs, you see what I'm saying? Yes. So if we use the blockchain uh as a mechanism for attempting to record uh what people did, this works pretty well in constrained environments. Mhm. If we use it as a way of recording what people said they thought, this works pretty well. Um the problems will come when we begin to assume that because the record is permanent, the record is accurate. And I think that there's a lot of room for, for example, getting political figures to make statements

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZeV75Wa0k&t=1500s) which are recorded in a blockchain and have penalties accorded if reality doesn't behave the way they said it was going to. So you pointed out at a number of problems that our society has and the ways how we can improve. Do you believe situations situations? Yes. Because you know it's not clear to me for example that the death of meaning yeah is uh a bad thing right because most of the meaning that human beings have made up for themselves over history has been pl blatantly obviously nonsense right almost every myth that human beings have made to explain history has turned out to be flawed once you got a better model of history once you get better archaeology the stories fall apart and there's almost no historical story which has turned up to stand up to the kind of test of modern scholarship yes um So if we stop expecting to be able to explain ourselves against these macro stories in a way that makes sense, what may happen is that we might begin to accept just how random and chaotic life in the world are and find good ways of responding to that reality. So rather than paper over in the cracks with new mythology, maybe we stop making mythology and we live in the chaos. Okay. So this chaos that you're talking is it just a condition of our society or is it an illness? And if it's an illness, what diagnosis would you give to the society that we live in? No, I think it was always the case. I think that that chaos has been constant since probably the invention of language. But that to get rid of the chaos, people have made up mythologies. So the rate of change has made it almost impossible to make up a mythology which will allow you to cope with the facts, right? It's really hard to tell a story that in some way encompasses like the singularity is the last attempt, right? We're going to tell a story about how all the computers are going to come together and make God. Yeah, you're talking crap, right? Not going to happen. Not the way the world works. Not the way AI will work. You know, I can give you 50 reasons I don't think that will happen. But the singularity in many ways is the last great myth that people are telling to cope with the fact that change is going faster than their ability to make myth. Yes. So, if we can't make myth anymore, and we have to admit we don't really understand what's going on. We've got a handful of scientific fact and a few thousand liters of opinion and then inside of this we have to make decisions. Maybe we get used to the idea that we're really dealing with unknowns because humanity has always been really bad at dealing with the unknown. But if we accept that we are always dealing with the unknown and we are necessarily dealing with the unknown, we might get into a position where we begin to develop real skill in dealing with the unknown. And this to me

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZeV75Wa0k&t=1650s) looks like an abiding path, right? If society begins to accept, look, we're about 20% confident that this is true, but we have to take action. So, we're going to take 20% of the action we would have taken. Y and we'll see what happens. Yes. You could begin to get into a situation where societies learn how to deal with risk. They learn how to deal with uncertainty. And they learn how to accept change. And to me, this would be like waking up from history. Like, okay, we accept we don't understand what's happening. We have to continue to act because otherwise we fall behind and we're going to get as much certainty as we can. We're not going to pretend we have more than we have and then we're going to take graduated action on that basis. That to me would be fundamental learning. That would be a human cultural change that's been coming for I don't know 10,000 years. Accepting the unknown, not making up a myth to cover the unknown, acting in a proportionate way to our level of uncertainty and kind of feeling our way forward. That to me would be real progress. Don't you believe that's that is a part of human evolution anyway that we are much better in at dealing with unknowns than people 100 years ago for example. Oh I think it's definitely happening right. I mean the the general worldwide decline in uh religious explanations for the world I think is a really really good thing. I think in general we've got a wake up of the from the medieval position. Um the thing that worries me most actually is the erosion of scientific truth by market forces. You know, I mean if we had managed to keep science relatively clean, we would be in a position where scientific truth would be something we could anchor to. But the increasing tendency, for example, for drug companies to do a ton of different studies and then only publish the ones that show their stuff works. You know, that kind of erosion of the scientific method could leave us with no anchor at all. And that would be a disaster because you know if if we've got scientific repeatable experiment as an anchor that we can cling to then we can continue to make progress in a way which has some kind of fundamental realism. But if market forces you know eat science then we're completely without a rudder and at that point all that can happen is a crash. Yeah. Interesting. When we talked about innovation, you said that cultural adoption is um lagging behind, but the same is true for regulatory framework. Do you believe that we have some opportunities there or it's more of a problem for innovators to have to face those kind of issues? Well, okay. So, let's go back to Singapore, right? One

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZeV75Wa0k&t=1800s) of the things that Singapore markets is regulation, right? You bring a new thing to Singapore, we will figure out how to regulate it. We'll keep an eye on you. It'll be fine. The Swiss, they sell regulation. You bring your thing to Switzerland, you explain it to them. They figure out that nobody is being defrauded and that the business is fundamentally sound, albeit a little funnyl looking. Okay, you know, let's just see how this goes, but if you do something wrong, we're going to feed you into a wood chipper. And that sort of an approach where regulation is coming up as a service is something that I'm super interested in. Yes, you know, I'm trying to build a bunch of structures in London that will help us take technologies like blockchain and build out lots and lots of mechanisms for dispute resolution that don't involve regulators so that when we finally get to the point of regulation, the regulators will have 5 or 10 years of good practice uh to write regulation from and those kind of soft approaches I think make a ton of sense. And when you talk about those changes, do you believe that we need a multistakeholder approach to this? So people from different areas talking about um problems that we face and trying to solve them. Who is in the position to solve this? For example, I'm generally very against multistakeholder. Um I used to work in disaster management and contingency uh planning. And one of the one of the things that I um invented when I was working on that was a concept of the uh called the goat rodeo. And a goat rodeo is what happens when you do multistakeholder engagement where the stakeholders don't agree on the solution. So if everybody around the table is government and they don't agree about what's happening, competition is possible. Big powers can squash the lesser powers. You come to an agreement based on force and then the law gets passed and you go and do the thing. Uh if you've got multistakeholder engagement where you have all of these different kinds of stakeholders where there's no ability for one group to muscle another group, then if they don't agree about what they're doing, the discourse can go on indefinitely because all they can do to each other is bore each other and to talk the ears off. So they go around and around and around in the circle, but they never come to a conclusion. So in general, when you're dealing with an unknown, I think that multistakeholder processes simply never terminate, whereas single stakeholder processes can be resolved by power dynamics. And and I think there's a lot to be said for single stakeholder groups figuring out how to solve the damn problem for themselves and then using those points of certainty and points of clarity as kind of uh pins from which you can then hang the rest of the solution. You know, if the banking industry figures out

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZeV75Wa0k&t=1950s) exactly how they're going to regulate blockchain, other industries could then take that as a template. But if you had a multi-industry stakeholder group, they would talk for the next 20 years. So we are talking about a certain group of people setting a direction maybe for technological development or society in general and don't you think that that can be a problem in itself for example if you have a serum which to complete system and you have programmers who are building a code based on that system and they're using their own knowledge and we don't have a multistakeholder approach to this don't you believe that we can potentially ran into problems. Well, I mean, we've tried to run society on a multistakeholder basis for really 50 years since the 60s and I would say that it's been more or less universally disastrous. We've eroded the ability of governments to take strong decisions and as a result, we've wound up with a society which is entirely run by the press, right? Public opinion, hysteria, craziness, it's plays important component in decision- making. It's really messing us up, right? So what I would like to see is um massive accountability for failure. So for example, if you take the processes around the Iraq war, we all know that the Iraq war was sold to the public on the basis of you know an enormous amount of cooked intelligence where the elites had decided there was going to be an invasion and then they got the intelligence services to basically lie to the public about it. The public made it very clear they didn't believe these lies anyway. You got 2 million person protest in London. The invasion happens and then it's a complete disaster. really that should have been an occasion for firing the entire political class involved in making those decisions. But there was no accountability for failure. So in terms of straightening out the mess, I think that multistakeholder engagement is simply resulting in confusion and an inability to make decisions. What we need is accountability for failure. When you say accountability, do also mean transparency that comes with accountability. Do we actually have to be transparent in terms of decisions and um how that would work? Um transparency is very powerful but it's also very dangerous because there are certain things where transparency is impossible and when you try and bring transparency into those areas what you get is deception. So a good example is medical records. Yes. Um doctors often have opinions about patients which the patients would find extremely upsetting. Right. Uh so uh a good example would be

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptZeV75Wa0k&t=2100s) mental illness right the patient is convinced they are saying the psychiatrist is fairly convinced that there is something wrong but they can't put their finger on it they refer to a specialist right in that situation if the patient is in the loop the patient will receive inferior care because rather than the doctor being able to write down what they believe and pass on the full context the doctor will have to write in coded language which may be misinterpreted on the other end so there are situations where for your own welfare where the professionals that are on your side have to be able to communicate without your knowledge. And medicine is a very specific example. It's got a whole bunch of agency questions. But the same is true for some branches of government. If you try and run a transparent secret police, you're going to have a secret police which is completely invisible that does all the stuff that the transparent secret police can't do and these guys will be completely unaccountable. Yeah. And this is for example the problem with the American black budget which is it appears to be tiered five layer deep. It's also about control. How do you control people who control for example that kind of situation? Yeah. So my preference is transparency in the areas when transparency is possible but massive accountability in the areas where it isn't. So if we accept that there is some need for a black state that has to do the stuff to maintain democracy that nobody wants to admit has to be done. You also need the ability to seriously discipline these people when they drop the bomb. We trusted you to act behind our backs. You've screwed it up. You're going to the wall.

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End of [693] Interview with Vinay Gupta by Paul Tanasyuk | Blockchain, Identity, Resilience and Social Order. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [691](https://guptaoption.com/texts/691.md) Vinay Gupta (Part 2) by Paul Tanasyuk | Blockchain,... (2017); the most closely related, [231](https://guptaoption.com/texts/231.md) Chit Chat With the Nightmare Destroyer (2025); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.