# EB114 – Vinay Gupta: From Lawyer Capitalism To Programmer Capitalism (part 2 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [694], part 2 of 2. 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, 2016-01-18 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015), before the law step (Mattereum, 2017).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Transparency as accountability for relief; precursor framing for Mattereum.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The Second Amendment in Iraq, Combat Robotics, and the Future of Human Liberty (2008): Blog essay arguing that combat robots would end the balance in which an armed population can make an...
  - Dog Atheism: on smart contracts, risk, and value networks (2016): Essay drafted live in public: smart contracts as capitalism's calculus, with richer instruments than cash...
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine)
  - 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)
  - Half a Trillion Dollars a Year of Magic: Blockchain, AI, and the Future of the Built Environment (2026): Mattereum essay: combine AI with the blockchain into self-enforcing smart contracts and move real estate... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - cyber and defense: Security work for defense clients, built on one idea: set rivals to check each other. Resilience and Opportunity in...
  - 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)
  - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Cryptography, encryption & cypherpunks (11%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: programmer capitalism (6 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); basic income (10 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Cypherpunks (7 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Epicenter (3 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); State of the Net (2 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); cypherpunk (5 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); state power (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); contracts (17 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); smart contracts (11 here; 110 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); jobs (8 here; 85 sources in all, earliest dated 2003, 4 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): Reagan; democratic machinery
- Importance: core-text score 0.58 (1.00 is the top), number 51 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [242] [Dog Atheism: on smart contracts, risk, and value networks (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/242.md): same career work: Dog Atheism: on smart contracts, risk, and value networks
  - [163] [Tell Me Who You Are. Identity, institutional memory, and... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/163.md): same career work: Dog Atheism: on smart contracts, risk, and value networks
- On the same works, just before: [759] [Vinay Gupta, Robin Hood Coop London Open Office, August 2015 (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/759.md); [769] [Vinay Gupta talk, Amsterdam 21/10/2015 (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/769.md); [242] [Dog Atheism: on smart contracts, risk, and value networks (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/242.md)
- On the same works, just after: [684] [DEVCON1: Dangerous Old Men: Cypherpunk's Failure,... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/684.md); [688] [Vinay Gupta on the beginning of blockchain (360,... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/688.md); [776] [Vinay Gupta presents "Nuclear Poker" to the London... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/776.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: EB114 – Vinay Gupta: From Lawyer Capitalism To Programmer Capitalism, video, 2016-01-18, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [694], https://guptaoption.com/texts/694.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[39:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=2371s) alternative sort of structure to the lawyer capitalism yes exactly right so you know the 780 90% of commercial disputes that could potentially be settled with a pretty simple system where you take the body of law you write it up as a smart smart contracts and then you have professionals that input reliable data into those systems and if they're found out to be lying or they uh they they turn out to be wrong you have an insurance system that basically uh covers the claims that result from those erors right so you still have some humans in the loop because the humans have to decide what the facts of the case were but once you decide the facts of the case the Machinery makes the decisions and I think we could probably resolve huge percentages of the current systems uh lawsuits in those kind of conditions it's going to take a long time to write the software but if you think of the complexity of something like a self-driving car I don't think it's at all unreasonable to think of a self uh a self overseeing contract and this is this is definitely futurism but you know think of all the airline tickets all of the package deliveries all of the you know purchase orders all the rest of this kind of stuff that are huge parts of society which is just the same handle being turned over and over and over and over and over again you know Venture Capital deals you know come with a bunch of contracts which are enormously complicated but if you had a bunch of smart contracts where you basically just punched in a bunch of parameters you know what's the equity split who are the owners you know who's meant to be in charge then you know if there's a later lawsuit the vast majority of that stuff would just get sorted out by software and I think that's entirely reasonable over time it could take 10 or 15 years but over time I think the repetitive parts of the law will will be automated I I think the it's interesting I I've talked with some people also about uh smart contracts exactly in that way and of course the effects from an economic perspective is that when we look at what happened with automation you know at one point there was all the blue collar jobs got automated and this is a lot of these sort of not super creative White Collar you know middle class office shops having the exact same thing to that yes class

[42:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=2521s) War I would also like to tie in like two or three more threads from from your life into into this discussion right so to kind of make this whole point very uh very real in in front of us like you've been a cypherpunk and uh in in the show you said that you were involved with the digital like the digital gold U movement in in the early 2000s mhm and uh and you you you had the feeling that they created better money but they didn't have the potential for a better Society because they didn't have the technology of smart contracts uh yes my basic questions are like who is the CER Punk fundamentally what did they want and why did they fail ah well this is a very interesting question right so this goes all the way back to gchq in the 19 7s gchq is the English equivalent of the NSA government communication headquarters and they invent public hey cryptography at gchq a good few years before it's reinvented inside of the public domain um there's a really good write up about that kicking around called something like the alternate history of cryptography so once you've got public key cryptography you have the ability to generate secure Communications between people that have never met each other and digital signatures and digital signatures give you the potential for very high levels of trust again between people that have never met and never will so in the early 1990s Phil Zimmerman implements these you know algorithms inside of pgp pretty good privacy and then there's a wave of sort of you know this kind of speculative technological futurism where a bunch of Engineers and a bunch of business people and a bunch of Science Fiction writers a bunch of journalists sit around and talk about the future relative to some new technology so right now that conversation is happening around life extension it's happening around automation drones right a little bit around Bitcoin um so out of those conversations comes this realization that the natural shape of a society which has public key cryptography as a fundamental part of it is radically different from the shape of society we have today it's as different from the society we have today as capitalism was from feudalism or industrialism was from farming right so the people that Embrace

[44:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=2671s) that as a perspective become Cypherpunks they become people who say look relative to the modern technology base a completely different Society is possible and that completely different society would be better than the one that we have now for the following reasons and off they go and they make that case and the result of that kind of whole process that whole push is this model that fundamentally this kind of encryption is a human right and access to that kind of encryption is fundamental to human Freedom which puts the cypherpunks in direct conflict with the state because the state is basically the American government it's like no no no no no no no these are Munitions you don't need to own public cryptography anymore than you need to own a personal landmine don't do it so the process of that struggle realigns the Cyber punks uh uh sorry the Cypherpunks realigns them into a uh more strongly anti-government movement than they had been initially and that struggle for legitimacy goes on for several years until the entire thing basically washes out after 911 so 911 happens and the cipher Bank movement really hugely loses momentum because the National Security State basically is going crazy it's like a bull in a china shop and nobody really feels that that stuff is kind of relevant anymore at that point except Julian Assange so there's a long kind of Dead period where not much happens then you get Assange and then you get Snowden and Snowden is basically the the point where the cipher bankk movement finally bit the government in a way that mattered because Snowden takes an enormous of repository documents out of the NSA and publishes them and it becomes completely pure to anybody that's paying attention that the American government has slipped into being something along the lines of a police state or a Fascism and we're in the very very early process uh the very early parts of the process to repair that M now that snowden's made it visible to the political Elites in America that they are being spied on eventually they will find a way to stop it and then we'll have a kind of new vision of America emerge so uh so now now now now let's let's let's get let's put this conversation in some perspective um most of our listeners and including us are people who have not lived the cypherpunk movement and for us public key public key private

[47:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=2821s) cryptography is kind of a granted we don't we don't really know the history you you uh they went through tell us like in in your in your answer there was a statement that like public key cryptography is such a fundamental invention that if you take it to its conclusion that society would be so radically different from the current one that uh the that difference is the same as the difference between industrial society and Agricultural Society tell us why this is such a fundamental invention okay so um that's a really tricky question it's really really subtle we take a crack at it so throughout human history the only way to prove to somebody that you knew a secret was to tell them what the secret was and that's been the status of information as it flowed through human societies since the adventure of dirt right it's it's an Ancient Ancient truth that if I know a secret my the only way for me to communicate that secret to you is to tell you the secret and once in a while people have figured out ways around that property that gave them a little bit of an advantage and they've used those so a good example of this is that around the time of the early days of the Scientific Revolution um scientists used to make predictions that they thought were too ridiculous to really publicly claim but if somebody else thought the idea and it turned out to be true or they could prove it later on they wanted to establish when they had had the idea so they used to publish strings of letters and the strings of letters it would be like a13 b11 c41 d11 you know uh e19 and what it would refer to is a sentence and you were counting the number of times a given letter appeared in the sentence and later dat you could publish the sentence and the sentence would correspond exactly to the letter count that had been published and this was like a very perimed form of a hash function right and scientists were using that stuff as a way of establishing seniority of claim on radical ideas that they didn't really dare publish until they had strong evidence but it was a way of dating your hunches essentially um you know similar kinds of things happen around commercial use of ciphers um you know the Roth STS of a private community communication Network which I seem to remember was largely par carrier pigeons with I can't remember

[49:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=2971s) they use codes or not very the Templars had codes so there's always been a use of those Technologies inside of the Frameworks right the system of the world has always used cryptography where it's been available they've always used you know things like hash functions and primitive forms once you come along and you build systems like that that are essentially perfect hugely hugely powerful things begin to happen um you know if I could send a completely secret message to anybody in the world and it's impossible for anybody to break that and read the message things like Espionage become trivial anybody inside of a government can send an encrypted message to somebody with a bunch of government secrets in it and the government will have no way of knowing what was inside the message so you can't prove the Espionage occurred sounds completely crazy more or less what happens every time somebody leaks something from inside of government these days um you also get a whole bunch of abilities to turn things like free speech into what you talk performative speech act so if I speak I am spending this Bitcoin and put a digital signature on it that speech is actually the spending of the Bitcoin so you wind up in a position where the economy becomes completely unified with the culture because spending is trans speaking and speaking is transacting God only knows what that turns into in the long run but when you take the things like the absolute right Free Speech which is commonly entrained in the American model then what comes out of the fact that spending is speech is this notion of unlimited opportunities to spend in ways people consider radical because you're still protected by your free speech rights everything you look at if you look at it in the right way that could conceivably touch cryptography even at a theoretical level is currently turning itself inside that the whole thing is in freef Fall okay very interesting now the the thing that mayor was referring to right it's it's a talk of you so we'll link to that as well that you gave a def con about sort of cypherpunks and and why the their Vision didn't really pan out and wasn't so successful now you gave a few reasons in there and there's one that the public infrastructure problem predominantly that's one that's one and I would like to talk about that but there was also another one that I thought was would be very interesting to talk about which

[51:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=3117s) uh you called meta structures uh we we can start with either one So Meta structures is white word for companies corporations governments guilds and all the rest of this kind of stuff and the tools that the Cypherpunks generated were point-to-point communication tools encrypted messaging whether it was email or chat was the core thing that Cypherpunks produced um for example https you know the the secure standard used for doing things like credit card payments or login online https was a cypherpunk technology um so while you're in a position where you're deploying the crypto in a way that is largely about point-to-point communication you can't have a situation where you've got a s 25 person group that votes on something and it's all secure so you can't have say a company board do a bunch of deliberation on uh s set decisions they want to make you can't you know you can't go through and you know have a voting or a Democratic process or a jury process and then somehow have that represented to the world in a cryptographically secure way there's just no really good way of doing it inside of those models once you bring along new technology like smart contracts that allows you to do that kind of thing you get hugely greater expressive power so the same set of algorithms generate a vastly new set of social possibilities so the cypherpunk tooling that we had before ethereum really didn't support group formation very well it didn't support running organizations it didn't support things like jury trials it was really really limited to people basically writing each other secure letters and once you open up beyond that all kinds of other things become possible how does that relate to what we are seeing today with the for example the debate about the block size in Bitcoin do you think that really sort of maybe Bitcoin is one of the last technologies that successful on on a sort of huge scale sort of Cypher PR Technologies as successful that hasn't explicitly built in some sort of you know formal governance structure that allows decision making on a protocol level to happen so bein's problem was that you know if people thought that well people thought Satoshi clearly thought that Bitcoin was illegal right he seems to have function on the assumption that he was going to get nuked by the feds for having WR written this piece of software so he didn't really want to be in the public

[54:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=3267s) eye and therefore he built no governance structure the notion was that it was essentially leaderless resistance and I think that Satoshi would probably have been horrified by the idea that the federal government would Embrace Bitcoin to the extent that it has uh never mind Wall Street you I don't think s would be pleased about that at all um but given that you know these Technologies are being rapidly embraced by governments and by companies there's a pretty good chance that actually you know the Machinery is not going to try and Destroy these Technologies and that means you could build governance structur that are really public and open and transparent the way the Charities are and still build cryptographic um I don't know what you'd call them cryptographic social transformation tools because it seems like what's happening is that the state has simply stopped thinking of this kind of cryptography is a threat at which point there's no reason to be underground but couldn't you have have a a governance structure where you do have transparency in all of those things but you also have uh the participants you know you have the anonymity of the participants so can't you have both yeah oh you could there's oh there's no doubt that you could build that right no doubt at all but at this point in history it seems like there's not much of a reason to right you know there hasn't actually been any kind of really really heavy state level retaliation or retribution against say Bitcoin users or even Bitcoin devs for the most part you know the governments are basically looking at these as being a new generation of database technology that they can integrate and assimilate so the Revolutionary claim that this technology was going to hugely impact the function of the state and it was going to be this you know kind of endpoint tax starvation disintermediation Tim May Cipher Nomicon kind of a trip which was a huge part of the claim made in the 1990s that doesn't seem to be what's happening the state just seems to be adapting and maybe we shouldn't be surprised by that but my point would probably be well a few things so number one is they didn't have to right because Bitcoin is still like completely irrelevant if you look at it from a larger economic perspective right so they they were they could enforce a lot of things on level of exchanges and wallets and and they never had to go to the protocol level but if you did have let's say Bitcoin became

[56:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=3417s) very big and then those developers had that crucial role and let's say they said oh we're going to do you know zero cash or something like that it's going to be like a part of Bitcoin I mean I cannot imagine that you would not have an enormous amount of pressure on those people and I think if that was you know if there the control structure of a project like that was public uh you know I mean I think the government we would see a completely different government response than we have seen so far maybe they just use the software for running the black budget you think the US government uses Bitcoin to run black budgets no no but they certainly could right I mean you think that having this kind of you know Anonymous secret transactional infrastructure would be in some way a threat to the government but if that was a threat to the government why does the government fund Tor remember Tor is a US government funded project and it has been since before the beginning so if they were afraid of these kind of Technologies there's no reason to fund T the official reason that the US government says that it funds Tor is to provide cover traffic for the US Navy's Communications at se right I just don't think the government really is threatened by these Technologies they don't respond like they're being threatened they seem to be quite eager for this stuff to mature so they can use it for Stuff think of how much more convenient the Reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan would have been if they'd had Bitcoin no need to ship enormous you know crates of cash billion dollars strapped or an enormous wooden plank you know wrapped in cingi and dropped off a plane to some local War award you just sent the guy Bitcoin there's almost nothing that the government cannot find use for at given time so I think that we're in a position where what's happening is that we're seeing social change because new technologies arrived and the state is adapting to the social change in the same way that the state usually it up to the social change yeah it's I I I think again I I view it a little bit differently I mean I think there's there's a variety of ways to use that technology right so I mean in a way blockchains are agnostic right they don't have inherent value you can use it for all kinds of things and there's certainly things where governments can use that technology and do things that are perfectly reasonable uh and attractive to government and then you know they will do that they will use it right but at the same time if you

[59:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=3567s) have something like Bitcoin for example or ethereum as well right you can also see a lot of uses that they cannot control and I I would think that those instances of those uses of Technologies are not things that governments will like to see because it is in the end it is a a loss of a loss of power right if Government doesn't like to see that stuff why did they fund Tor Tor is a te technology for this so-called culture of anonymity and all the rest of that stuff and the government has put millions and millions of dollars into tour how do you explain that I mean so number one I would say it very much seems to be the case right that the NSA or some of government agencies do have the capability to De anonymize T so if you look at it from that perspective maybe it's not such a bad tool right you have all these people who think they need to hide things from the government like self-identify themselves by using Torah and then the only people who can uh find you know track them down is like the US government right so that's one thing I would so so you basically think that Torah is an enormous honey poot run by the US government is that what you're saying I mean I suspect it has become that at least I'm not saying it was planned to go that way but from my superficial impression of the project it seems to have sort of evolved into that h i mean that is a very uh controversial statement I know a lot of to tour developers you know uh on Twitter seem to be you know rejecting that position very very strongly over and over again as loudly as they can um I guess we wait and see what happens right maybe some future leer will reveal what the real status of Torah is um but if the government doesn't find tor to be fundamentally a threat I don't see any reason why they would find Bitcoin to be fundamentally a threat right I think that the evidence is that they're fairly neutral towards these Technologies today's magic word is hexayurt h e x a Yu r t head over to let talk bitcoin.com to sign in enter the magicw and claim your part of the listener reward [Music]

[1:01:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=3717s) so so V uh you you are a global resilience Guru and your kind of one of your big interests is to think about how can things go wrong so what you're essentially saying is uh the scenario that the American government the Chinese government and the Russians will partner together to clamp down on cryptocurrency is is not an not an interesting threat to worry about no I just I don't I don't see any real incentive for them to do it you know I just don't see any evidence that they're heading in that direction I think if anything what you're going to see is massive use of these currencies by the intelligence Community to hide their operations use of these currencies to you know manage know chunks of stuff with the black budget um you know I just don't perceive this stuff to be a threat to state power in the way that people seem to think it is and but by the way the reason that I don't think it's a threat to state power is because the state doesn't react to it as if it was remotely worried there isn't even the slightest trace of anxiety on the behavior of the US government towards these things right you want to see something the US government has anxiety about look at the way that they basically smashed occupy with a big hammer right that's what it looks like when the US government doesn't like you it's people kicking down your door and pepper spraying your dog and that's just not happening inside of the Bitcoin Community people aren't being arrested they're not being investigated up being hassled the state is completely complacent and either that's the worst mistake in human history or actually they've looked at it and decided that it just doesn't matter that much and and what about the other movement so so like like you talked about how we had lawyer capitalism and I'm going to term the smart contract bureaucracy that is coming hopefully as programmer capitalism so what you're saying is you're moving from lawyer capitalism to programmer capitalism right do you think the state would be worried about that no I think the state will simply be run by programmers right I mean look if Steve Jobs had lived what do you think the ODS are that Steve Jobs would have joined the you know 2016 presidential race probably running as a republican right 0% I'm Steve no I really think that jobs was so pissed off about the government preventing Apple from offering strong encryption on their phone I think there's a real chance jobs would

[1:04:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=3867s) have decided that he was going to run for government you know go in there and try and fix the problem from the inside just imagine it for a moment right so if jobs run for president you know you're already using my telephone you're going to get a message from me about my presidential campaign on your iPhone every morning whether you like it or not right I'm going to come up with a bunch of super smart guy Silicon Valley policies for fixing America they're going to have some elements from the right and some elements from the left they're going to be use Smart use of technology to fix real problems you have we're going to take all of this great thinking we did that produce the devices that are educating your children and facilitating the smooth function of your life and we're going to automate the federal government right okay so jobs is dead it's not going to be jobs um uh what about the guy that used to run ghoul Eric Schmidt right 2020 election what about Elon Musk gets the Rockets going pretty well decides that the weak Link in his plan for saving the world is actually the US government thinks that it might be possible to fix it from the inside it's only a matter of time until somebody from Silicon Valley with enough power and enough reputation enough money decides that the right place to steer the world from is not an office but the White House it's only a matter of time that's actually exciting yeah I mean personally I think the US government is is such terrible state that is can only almost only get better and uh I mean your choice at this point is a military coup or a takeover by Silicon Valley I think you'd rather have a take over by Silicon Valley right but I think the interesting thing there if you looked at Obama and you know when he came with all these plans he had and then if you look objectively at what he's done he's done nothing none of the things he said he's basically been he's basically been the black think he's been the black Ronald Reagan yeah you could say that right uh so you can ask like why was that right so there's only two explanations really right one either he was completely dishonest about it right so he was he was literally lying and like saying things to get elected but he didn't actually mean them or is he is he a politician is he a politician were his lips [Music] moving right but do you I I mean lying to an which is almost like mindblowing

[1:06:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=4017s) about everything like his or he came in there he had maybe he lied a little bit he had his yeah is he a politician and were his lips [Laughter] moving right politicians are professional Liars so we know for sure he was lying at least about some things politicians go and say whatever will get them elected for the well but there's different exent extends here I of course agree that all politicians lie probably quite a lot right but it's about is it just distorting the truth or is it literally saying the exact opposite of what you actually want to do um okay so what's the second part the well the second explanation of course is that he was probably lying like all politicians lie with a lot of things but that overall you know a lot of his intention things he was saying was also you know genuine intentions and to do that but then he came into office and he literally could not do any of those maybe he even in in as much as right the Republicans wind up controlling both Congress and Senate which leaves the president with very little ability to make law and if you can't get them to vote for your laws you don't have that much power to steer the country the American government is meant to be a government of laws not of men the president is not meant to have more power than Congress and the Senate so if the Congress and the Senate are Republican and the president is Democrat it's a bad time to be president because the power is with the lawmakers not with the executive branch right but the Congress and uh Senate weren't Republican the whole time here is President no they weren't Republican the whole time but they were Republican in the second term which was Republicans typically do all the radical stuff okay before like okay so that's uh I I think I think we have reach an impa so the last question um and by the way I'm not discounting the power of the black State here right military industrial complex and all the rest of that stuff is absolutely there and it's absolutely real and it's enormously powerful but the US population is largely served pretty well by the military-industrial complex which is why they don't use their power to throw them over the military industrial complex is a pretty good representation of what average American wants

[1:09:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=4167s) that's the problem if they didn't want it there would be huge mass demonstrations about the Injustice of American society all the time Sanders would have like 90% of the vote and the Democratic machinery would just shove these guys right over the problem is the military industrial complex is giving most Americans most of what they want most of the time which is a chance opportunity and a ton of National Security power that's why they don't change it that's something to think about the military industrial complex is a representation of what the average American wants y okay before before we close out cuz cuz we have already reached uh the the end like the end of our like standard interview okay like one question uh what does give us a vision for programmer capitalism what does it look like what what's different from lawyer what's different in programmer capitalism from lawyer capitalism okay so let me frame this a right look at the good side then look at the bad side or maybe look at the bad side of the good side so the bad side of programmer capitalism would be the programmer industrial complex which is basically robotic war machines robot traffic Ward at a massive surveillance state that you know gives you a machine that you carry around at all times that constantly spies on you would report everything you do to the government that's how s terrible doesn't it yeah that sounds terrible right you pay for your own surveillance device and all the information in your phone goes to the government already right we're already seeing programmer capitalism it's called the NSA right yeah so the bad side of this is that you get increasing power going to the technical branches of the state so the NSA becomes a larger and larger thing the US military becomes increasingly robotic you send the robots out to fight your Wars you know third world peasant Uprising where they're threatening to cut off the banana Supply is met by Ed 209 from RoboCop dropped from the sky in enormous numbers and they basically just keep shooting until there's no more Rio signatures then you send down the robots to go and harvest the bananas right you know the term Banana Republic it actually came from American invasions organized by banana companies mhm look it up look up the history of ban Republic the history is

[1:11:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=4317s) mindblowing so that is the kind of nightmare scenario of this kind of robot driven technocratic imperialism and it's clear that the American Military is pushing for that as hard as they could possibly go everybody agrees that putting American soldiers into the path of angry Brown men with guns is a losing proposition every time they try it they come back with a bunch of dead white boys and no real progress in their foreign policy objectives right just doesn't work to have very expensive very precious American soldiers who are very expensive to recruit and very expensive to train fighting peasants who are making you know $150 an hour and are you know using a 30-year-old AK-47 it just doesn't work um that's the downside the upside is a society in which everything that the government does is transparent and accountable and systems are provably fair because the software makes the decision so the law that's made by Congress or the Senate is encoded as software the software then makes the actual decisions the vast majority of the time so are you eligible for healthc care is decided by a piece of software that takes 15 seconds to give you an answer and if the answer is no it tells you exactly why the answer is no and if there's a factual error in that you take it to a human being that is certified as being able to restate the facts for the computer they restate the facts in an accurate form and you get your healthc care coverage right so you could build stable predictable transparent bureaucracies that manage the shared assets of society in a completely predictable way the tax code could become a piece of software with minimal human interpretation right your Tax Advisor basically takes the facts writes the facts down swears the facts are true if the facts aren't true they're going to face an enormous fine which will be covered by their insurance and if they're proven to have lied intentionally they're going to go to jail so you put all of the emphasis on accurate inputs into software that then makes decisions in a completely transparent way and I think that you could see something come out of that that is hugely more efficient than the current government is and is provably fair because it operates on you know clearly stated truth rather than an ambiguous human judgment um would a system like that be better for all things that the state does definitely not but I think that there's a 60 70 80% middle of the road just shuffling thing that the state

[1:14:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=4467s) does that could potentially go away pretty comprehensively and I think that that's really worth doing two extremes cool cool Brian I think that's close out that's a that's a good note to to end on we have some some exciting Visions about the future of of course I I if you do if you do have this Robo Banana Republic thing and and that is driven by by the industrial military complex it does sort of seem to imply that that's what the American people want no uh well and look in 2004 the American people voted for Bush again that undoubtedly everybody knew right yeah they're not that unhappy right the American people on average are not that unhappy about the status quo there are a small number of very intelligent very well educated science fiction reading predominantly white males who are of the opinion that they're being completely screwed by the system right and that demographic ranges from the guys that are out there in Oregon occupying some you know natural Wild Life preserve or whatever it is the Bandy Ranch guys right the way across through the kind of new Left Right the way out through the back end of you know extreme politics anarchism the cypherpunks all the rest of that stuff right but actually you know the feeling that something has gone wrong and it's the government's fault is pervasive right across the societal class which is losing power and that societal class is losing power to minorities and it's losing power to women and it's losing power to the people in the other end of the supply chain in China the core thing which motivates the vast majority of political resistance to the state is you know basically people that were privileged slowly losing economic advantage to classes that were previously less privileged or dirt poor nobody wants a fairer world except for the very very poorest half of humanity and the poorest half of humanity are largely peasant Farmers living on a single acre of agricultural land that they inherited from their great great great great great grandparents and which their grandchildren will live and die on in all probability that's 50% of humanity right people say they want a fairer world what they generally mean is they want to be richer the fairer world is a world that starts with improving the lives of the peasants in the very

[1:16:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=4617s) very poorest areas because they are the people that need the help most and we have to work up from there by layers the political access that we're operating on is largely a fantasy right we we've got this kind of colonial World model that we inherited from generation to generation after generation of imperialist Wars largely propagated by Europeans and Americans against the rest of the world and what's happening is as the colonial era ends because the rest of the world now has manufacturing capacity it now has independent political thought it's really beginning to catch up the bubble of privilege that colonialism created for people is collapsing and the people that are hit hardest are the people that were profiting the most from colonialism and that's the white males so the anger that the white males feel towards the government is that the government is no longer making them rich and different people Express that pain in different ways depending on where they come from in the political Spectrum so so once you start separating the loss of privilege from fairness a fair you know a fairer world is a world in which the poor do much better and the rich do much worse and most of the time people aren't campaigning for that because they don't identify themselves as being the rich and they definitely don't want to think about how much poverty there is and once you get clear about that you see the real revolutionary possibility of blockchains which is they could provide statistical evidence of how the world really works and then we could use that statistical evidence to Force real change where it really matters and it's up to us as a society to decide where that really is first the facts then the decisions that's what I wanted to say all right well V thanks so much I think we can we can wrap up with that so thanks so much for coming on I mean I think you're you're super elaborate and eloquent in expressing very interesting and unusual and sometimes viewpoints that one disagrees with but I think that makes for the most interesting discussions um so of course we will link to uh to a lot of your resources so we'll link to your resilience website uh some of the St work you've done with hexag and also some of your other talks you've done which are very interesting so thanks so much vene for coming on Splendid really good to talk and um yeah really a pleasure thank you and thanks to listener for listening so we are part of the let's talk Bitcoin Network so you can find lots of other shows as well well on leso bitcoin.com and we put out

[1:19:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=4767s) new episodes of Ender Bitcoin every Monday you can get them you know with your favorite podcast application whether it's on iOS or Android and of course you can watch the videos also on youtube.com/ appcenter BTC and if you are if you want to you can leave us an iTunes review or review anywhere you send us an email and then we will send you one of those t-shirts so we'll still doing that we've sent out lots of t-shirts all over the place and yeah so if you want one then just do that so thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week

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End of [694] EB114 – Vinay Gupta: From Lawyer Capitalism To Programmer Capitalism, part 2 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [684](https://guptaoption.com/texts/684.md) DEVCON1: Dangerous Old Men: Cypherpunk's Failure,... (2016); the most closely related, [242](https://guptaoption.com/texts/242.md) Dog Atheism: on smart contracts, risk, and value networks (2016); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.