# EB114 – Vinay Gupta: From Lawyer Capitalism To Programmer Capitalism (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [694], part 1 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 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=0s) this episode of epicenter Bitcoin is brought to you by high. me protect yourself against hackers and Safeguard your identity online with a first class VPN go to high. me/ epicenter and sign up for a free account [Music] today welcome to EP Center Bitcoin to show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization of the global cryptocurrency Revolution my name is Brian fa and cran and I'm M Roy today we have a special guest with us uh he's called Vinay Gupta many of you might already know him he has previously been a cypherpunk um a global resilience Guru a release coordinator for ethereum and he's now associated with consensus we'll be talking about all of these top topics uh identity how to how to fund public infrastructure and other other themes but first let's have an

[1:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=68s) introduction from the man himself Vinay Gupta so hi guys uh so right now I'm split between the uh consensus group and the ethereum foundation uh mostly working with consensus and uh I'm really kind of in the middle of doing the 2016 kind of planning an analysis just trying to figure out what's going to be important this year here and what role I have to play in that cool can you give us uh what are your most important interesting predictions for this year well so I think that up until now the entire field has been largely limited by available money you know you know it's been quite hard to raise funds for projects uh there's been a lot of curiosity from funders but not very much action and I think the R3 has kind of tipped the entire ecosystem into a different game here like it's legitimized this oce the blockchains are a technology that is critically important to Banking and at that point the money is seriously beginning to flow into the field so I think that this is the year where we're going to go from it being you know scarce money and abundant talent to it being abundant uh money and scarce talent and I don't think any of us really know how to operate in that environment we're so used to having to bang on the doors that now that the doors I think are largely Auto openening uh I think we're going to have a fair amount of chaos so what I'm trying to do is look at what happened in the do world over the past 10 or 15 years to try and figure out how our field is going to change and what we have to do to adapt to the new operating environment where we're going from being Scrappy Outsiders to being the new mainstream so so you're predicting a DOT a do blockchain bubble oh it's already started I mean the uh my estimate is that we're going to see a billion dollars come into the ethereum ecosystem in 2016 alone and the General estimates for the amount of money going into the entire blockchain ecosystem including Bitcoin is only order of 10 billion I think 10 billion this year is what we're going to see yeah 10 billion this year so so for example JP Morgan uh recently released a a report suggesting that they were going to put 9 billion actually I think it might be leaked rather than released but they were going to put 9 billion into the high-tech ecosystem including drones and blockchains government of Singapore has a$7 billion smart cities program uh and is seriously interested in blockchain stuff there's just a really really

[3:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=218s) really broad-based push from larer entities to get this technology into their systems no I I totally agree with that and I'm certainly very optimistic and bullish on the prospects as well but that is definitely a different level of uh oh yeah yeah we'll see if that happens that that would certainly be interesting to see what happens then because you're certainly right right there's a there's a a certain lack of talent and and a lot of immaturity too so if you start having compiling that like immaturity of the tech and the knowledge how to use it and all so if you combine that with insane inflows of money I agree You' probably end up with all kinds of uh interesting weird and slightly nonsensical projects well it one of the things that really strikes me about this is it's very very hard to pick winners right so I I saw you know this investor Paul Graham runs an outf called y combinator so Graham describes what he thought when he was offered the opportunity to invest in Facebook which was that it was a tool for people who had no money to do something not very important uh and it was you know obviously not going to go anywhere right you know it's a way for college students to waste time on the internet that that is just why would anybody invest in that kind of thing lots of people looked at Airbnb and said people are not going to rent each other's living rooms to each other that's crazy that's never going to happen you know how do we tell what's going to be important and what isn't ahead of time ye yeah absolutely so before we keep going with that let's take a step back and focus a little bit on you on your background so one of these uh labels or that are applied to you at you plat things you call yourself as as a resilience Guru can you tell people what what is resilience what do you mean with that well so my background is disaster relief I mean I have many backgrounds I've done lots of things over the years but um I spent many years on a disaster relief technology called the hexayurt uh which is um do you know Burning Man have you been to burning man I have been to burning man it's actually funny CU I have been to Burning Man and I was I was listening to your interview on with London real which was fantastic by the way uh and I heard you say mention

[6:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=368s) that you invented the hex and I have I was in a burning man in 2012 and I remember like Googling about it in preparation and reading about the hexayurt so I was like oh wow that was you so yeah I I I know what you're talking about there but perhaps for those who

[6:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=389s) don't know yeah what is the hexayurt Y uh well so I'm going to show you a picture right here if I can get this down thing to open uh I guess that'll work so let's see how's that for a high-tech solution huh so there you could see on the screen uh this silver building sitting in the middle of the desert uh apologies for it kind of wobbling a little there we go so the point of that building is that the wall is a whole sheet of 4x8 just as it comes off the track and the roof pieces are triangles which are half a sheet of 4x8 cut on the diagonal zip boom there's your triangle and the reason for doing that is it means you could take an industrial supply chain which generates plywood or OSB or polyiso insulation or whatever it happens to be and you can take the stream of that material add a table saw and maybe a couple drills to the end of that process and have an emergency housing solution so it's a really really really simple way of generating enormous quantities of Housing and given that we've got s 60 million refugees in an ongoing Refugee crisis in Europe it seems like the kind of situation where being able to generate huge amounts of housing really cheaply might be a good idea uh and that's the the first part of a much broader system so the second part if I can just bring this up uh apologies for the somewhat uh low Tech AV solution so the second part is thing

[7:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=479s) called the dart board of death can you see this here the dart board of death and uh it's a planning tool called simple critical infrastructure maps and it's a way of figuring out if you're going to deploy 60,000 hexayurts in the middle of a desert field desert plane what do you need to provide people as well as the basic physical structure so that they can live you need maybe some solar panels or Communications you need toilets you need water filters but most of all what you need is a comprehensive map of human needs so that you know whether you've covered everything on uh the required list or not and it's actually quite hard to come up with a fully objective fully comprehensive list of human needs that will apply in all places at all times um but that's what the resilience map system does uh and I did this stuff uh I worked a bit with the Red Cross I worked a bit with the UN I worked a bit with the American Department of Defense I worked a bit with diffed in the UK um I worked a lot with the team that went onto to do the Ikea shelter the one that they're deploying in Syria uh and Jordan I think right now um and so that's what I did for a really long time and they use them in enormous numbers of Burning Man they just download the plans from the internet and build them there's probably a couple million dollars worth of them built every year so uh what kind of

[9:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=558s) disaster scenarios are you most concerned about personally well so for me the big thing is climate change the expectation is that we're going to see something on the region of 150 million people displaced and the existing humanitarian systems are completely unable to cope with 150 million people who have no place to go back to so we've got pretty good solutions for doing temporary shelters but we don't have good solutions for long-term or permanent displacement and most of the people that are displaced by climate are going to be permanently displaced because their homes are gone and their Farmland is covered in salt water or the cities are just covered in mold they're never going to be inhabitable again so um so that's a lot of people like 150 million people displaced is a is a big big amount cuz I mean what's what's that like that's uh that might be like you know a few like one or two percentage of the world's population so we talking a very big number that's right that's right okay and uh and you personally see this kind of scenario occurring over the time Horizon like what kind of time Horizon we've already got 60 million refugees as it stands um so that number is only going to go up until we find some better solution for dealing with them look do cryptocurrencies have a role to play in a scenario like that like like if you have 60 million refugees already and you could go up to 150 million let's say with climate change what role does cryptocurrency Tech have there um well so cryptocurrency Tech itself is a small part of a much wider set of things you could do um so the technologies that give you the assurance that the Bitcoin won't be double spent can also give you things like passports they could give you uh non-repudiable medical records they could give you you know all kinds of tight uh control of information and that's really really important to refugees so imagine that you are a refugee and you document every step of your journey on a blockchain right you've got an app on your phone you take some pictures of where you are you know the pictures get uploaded into ipfs the hashes get uploaded into the Bitcoin or the ethereum blockchain and every day you take a couple of pictures to document your conditions and document what's happening to you if you've got a 100 million people's worth of that stuff as a kind of public log of what's happening it becomes very hard to deny the scale

[11:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=708s) of the problem it becomes very hard to offer substandard services if something goes wrong and these people are for example left to freeze to death as happened in the Pakistan earthquakes um it becomes really obvious that you have people recording their damn deaths on camera in a blockchain you know and this forces accountability on the International Community um in addition if you've got the ability to isue Identity credentials maybe you can get people across borders and then finally you've got the ability to actually give people money using a blockchain um but you know fundamentally I think that there's a big question about accountability and I think that this is fundamentally about blockchains as an accountability technology first and as a currency technology second so is your interest in blockchains Bitcoin ethereum is that sort of an outgrowth of your interest in resilience and disaster or or do you view it as more of a separate thing that has some areas of intersection well I mean the fundamental reason I'm in this stuff is because I was a cipher Bank in the '90s so you know in I don't know 96 or 97 I helped people write some software for getting human rights abuse dat out of China uh I was very heavily involved in sort of magic internet money in 99 and 2000 when the technology Choice was a thing called eold uh I wrote a prototype for an append only general leder based cryptographic stock market with Bearer shares in 2000 so I was quite into this stuff um when I saw Bitcoin come over the horizon I completely ignored it because it I knew it was just a currency and what I'd seen from the eold example was that things which were just currencies didn't produce any social change it was better money but it was just better money if you wanted to produce interesting social change uh what was really required was um smart contracts so when ethereum came over the horizon it was like ah smart contractor back right that's worth going for a luk for around uh so you know I came over to the ethereum space and sure enough it was smart contracts and once you have Smart contracts you could build an entirely new work world the smart contract is a hugely powerful construct uh ex explain to us like so explain to us why a smart contract is powerful okay so um there's a whole bunch of different

[14:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=854s) reasons why support contracts are powerful but what they boil down to is this right now software exists inside of a given organization or inside of a given individual's property even if it's running in the cloud it's running in a piece of the cloud that you rent and therefore it's your Cloud the result is that the software always has the agency of the person that is paying for the software to exist and I mean agency in a kind of technical economic sense it's my software it's your software it's their software and as a result to a large degree software doesn't change the trust architecture that exists in the world my software is not that different from my staff or my book or my you know industrial machine whatever ever it happens to be once you get a smart contract you have software which isn't yours or mine exists in the space between us so the software is in some sense relational it doesn't exist inside of the nodes it exists inside of the network and that's interesting because it generates new architectures of trust and new architectures of trust you know the last time somebody invented a really fundamentally new trust architecture the output was capitalism you know the joint stock Corporation was a new way of handling trust limited liability was a new way of handling trust and what came out of that was enormous change I mean really really enormous change so I think that smart contracts probably won't have quite as much impact as the invention of capitalism but they could very very easily be the next stage of capitalism's development okay that's interesting so so actually that's one of the topics I wrote down I wanted to talk about was the sort of impact of all of this on capitalism so which was sort of towards the end but let's talk about it right now so do you view smart contracts as and blockchains as as the next stage of capitalism or is there also the the potential to have something that's you know truly different and and econom forms of economic interaction that aren't well very well described by the word capitalism so bucker for describes what we have now uh and what we call capitalism is law cap lawyer capitalism and lawyer capitalism basically the transactions are contractual the contracts grow and grow and grow and grow and grow because that's just the nature of reality that things grain complexity over time and as a result

[16:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=1004s) over time more and more and more the value in the system becomes owned by lawyers um one of the critical examples of that is that the US government is almost entirely made of lawyers you know there are almost no engineers in Congress of the Senate it's lawyers lawyers lawyers and more lawyers so F says that law cap is inherently sort of parasitic piratical inefficient and it has a whole bunch of fundamental problems because the most powerful class of people within lawyer based capitalism are also the people that have the most gain from being complex and inefficient and this results in ineffective economic choices um the notion that you could go to kind of tech cap right a technical capitalism where the vast majority of the hard decisions are made by software and codified bodies of software take the role that's currently made by law I think is pretty credible right I think that you know say 15 years from now you know by the time you guys are basically my age I think it's entirely credible that you could have a situation where you have you know hundreds of thousands of lines of software tens of millions of lines of software that embodies things like a a uniform commercial code which could be used for Tak making 70 80 90% of disputes and making an automated resolution on them so you have a set of trusted third parties or more likely insured and escrow bonded third parties that input the information into the systems about what happened and then the software makes a resolution based on previous case law and the rules that were programmed into it everybody can see the software therefore everybody knows the outcome of the decision before they actually act and as a result you wind up with this very broad clear Lane in which very ordinary transactions never wind up in court because everybody checks a transaction against the legal software before they acted as a result their actions are always legal and I think that that kind of stuff could grow out of the smart contract ecosystem really easily you know it's kind of like precognitive compliance you check against the compliance Suite before you act in the same way that you check against the test Suite before you upload a new piece of software to your servers and if it sounds kind of crazy now how crazy would it have sounded that we would have something like Amazon Prime now in 1995 when we were just you know before we' invented e-commerce so I agree I I think that's a very plausible Vision there that but

[19:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=1154s) essentially where you're going there is that whole set of economic interactions they they're maybe manual now and mediated by courts of Law and lawyers a lot right they ENT ually become automated and they also move a little bit at least or probably varies a lot uh depending on the situation and the environment but they move a bit out of the out of the grip of the sort of existing legal framework right well I mean international business is not going to continue to be tied up inside of nation state courts forever that that can't happen absolutely yeah but if you if you take a a step back and look at this is from a little bit more of a macro perspective what is the end result of that does that mean we just have the the sort of capitalism today where you have an enormous power for example of the the wealthy and those uh you know big corporations is that is that going even more like that because you have the the power of the state is being eroded and so you have uh let's say inequality um increases even more in a world like that because there's less uh ability to reinforce for example redistribution or uh will you also have let's say alternative models where people use things like ethereum cryptocurrencies uh daos to have completely novel models of interaction and community and economic collaboration okay so um this is where we get to a really really complex problem so different societies vote for different kinds of wealth distributions inside of democracies the Scandinavian societies vote for a more equal wealth distribution and they get it American society votes for a much less equal distribution and they get it you go to South America they vote for really unequal wealth distributions and they get those uh it's my opinion that in almost all societies the um Democratic mass of people could vote for more equality if they actually wanted it and in most cases what happens is they actually don't want that much more equality right what they want is more opportunity and generally speaking the voters are substantially to the right of

[21:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=1304s) the governments right so the political party system and fouryear electoral represent representative electoral democracy and all the rest of that kind of stuff seem to have a stabilizing impact on populations that if they were basically left to make their own laws would I think be vastly more libertarian vastly less caring vastly more selfish than they are now so for example I think that it's pretty clear that after the collapse of the Soviet Union things like the welfare state as a concept are largely being eaten away not by capitalism but because the voters just don't care enough to maintain the damn things so my feeling is that we're in a position where the world is growing increasingly competitive and increasingly selfish and I think that the way that we choose to deploy these technologies will mirror those values you're not going to see a fundamental change in how we do things in terms of you know sharing or welfare states or um you know those kind of concerns we're not going to see a more equal Society until people use their Democratic power to create one because if they're not willing to vote for more equality they're certainly going to deploy Technologies to give it to them I think the basic truth is that people right now just generally speaking don't care and we still have to build an efficient world and an effective world with people that are really fundamentally kind of uncaring about each other we have to make it work in spite of human nature not because of human nature yeah that's an interesting point of view I prob probably disagree with you on on some levels here I mean I think especially the idea that people have that much ability to you know make real choices I think if if you look at like for example the United States it seems to me that the political system is so corrupt and captured by uh you know large industrial interests and Lobby groups and stuff that the ability for I mean you would need an enormous amount of consensus among the population and sort of uh collaboration and movement to to Really fundamentally change something there but I I agree with you on the longer run uh but I mean that that that is democracy right democracy is that you don't change the rules of society until um more than half of the people who vote want that change so the kind of enormous Co you know collaboration that you're talking

[24:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=1454s) about to get change to happen that's what democracy looks like it requires enormous pressure from you know maybe 25 or 30% of your population to get change to happen that's the Democratic process if you've got a situation where smaller numbers of people could cause radical change you have a very poor representative democracy well I I don't know if I would agree with that I mean I think the you can have a system where there's there's it's so difficult for to have a the opinions from the voters sort of to flow up that in the end the the entities and the parties that sort of control the executive process you know they can have just enormous amount of latitude that largely remains unaffected by anything else that happens in the areas where the voters care they have no trouble at all controlling their political parties right American voters really care about drunk gun control they have no problem at all making sure that the parties keep them in uh keep gun control where they want it the proun people have a party that is always going to be proun and it fully represents that view the antigun people have a party that's fully anti-un and fully represents that view same thing on abortion rights right in the areas where the voters really care the parties completely comply and will not move for anything but you could also say that the two issues you brought up there gun control and abortion rights are things that really don't matter that much right if if you in terms of the actual power structures today there are like sideshows that nobody really cares about well they sure as hell matter to the voters well and enormously powerful and enormously powerful people I mean think of the size of the anti-gun Lobby in America or the size of the anti-abortion lobby in America these are huge organizations the National Rifle Association has something like 4 million members that's roughly 1% of all Americans maybe 2% it's an immense organization I don't know how big the total Collective of all the radical anti-abortion activists is but it's probably a similar size you know these are really really big pressure groups they're vastly bigger than the pressure groups around things like access to health care they're vastly bigger than the pressure groups around things like

[26:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=1604s) environment the bottom line is that what you're dealing with here is enormous public apathy about the issues that are important to us but are completely unimportant to them yeah I I wonder if you're right I think there's some other things going on as well well for example if you you know they've done experiments where they ask people uh ask for example Americans you know what do you estimate is the current

[27:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=1626s) wealth distribution you know how much uh of the wealth or income you know is earned by the top 1% top 10% you know so they asked that question and they ask what would you like it to be and the thing is that what people estimate is completely wrong and what they would like it to be that's like Americans tends to line with like the actual tribution in Scandinavia or something like that so there is a yeah yeah I I I know the I read an article or two about the stuff you're talking about yes it's absolutely true that if you show Americans you know you know wealth distribution graphs they're shocked by how much money is concentrated to the top right but if you tell them we're going to take everybody who's poorer than you and we're going to give them some of your money they freak out right but then for 99% of people you would ask you wouldn't actually take their money but you take the money of those extremely rich right so they well okay so if you're talking about reallocating wealth inside of dominant Imperial Powers that's not any in any way creating social justice right if you're stealing from the world at gunpoint which is basically the business model of Empire you know a prince is nothing but a stationary Bandit and um if you're stealing from people at gunpoint as a way of fuel in your economy even if inside of your country the economy is very egalitarian and fair outside of your economy you're still basically raping pillage Vikings so every time that the Americans start a war to try and bring the price of oil down every time that the Americans invade a bunch of South American countries so they can you know facilitate easier access to either cocaine or bananas right all of those kind of processes if you look at the other end of where America's wealth is created it's created inside of authoritarian socialism in China it's created inside of you know vicious feudalism in Africa so if you're going to have a society which is genuinely fairer you've got to remember that the global 1% line is $35,000 a year if you're making $35,000 a year you are the 1% globally so if wealth is going to be reallocated in a fair form it's going to make almost all of the you know European and American middle class is radically poer and they're going to fight that to the

[29:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=1776s) death let's take a short break to talk about hi. me look when you're choosing a VPN provider you want to make sure that your privacy is protected you know if a government agency tries to force the VPN provider to hand over some of your traffic or B or or browsing information will they be able to do that and is your payment information attached to the account these are all things that you want to consider when choosing a VPN provider with hi high. me all that's taken care of for starters they're based in Malaysia and Malaysian laws don't require them to keep any logs in fact high. me has no logs of your traffic or browsing uh history so even if a government agency was trying to force them to hand over some information they would be straight out of luck because hide.me has nothing to give them in addition to that they use a third party party payment provider uh which uh doesn't give them any of your payment information so they have they have no way to link an account to like a credit card or a PayPal account account so even if you're paying with PayPal or credit card there's no way for high. me to know which account paid for what and of course if you're paying with Bitcoin then you're completely transparent uh so what we suggest is if you're creating an account with high. me if you want that extra level of privacy just make a fake Gmail address and use that to sign in so that way you're completely Anonymous you can give hi toy a try with their free plan their free plan includes two gigabyt of data at unthrottled bandwidth you can use any of their free exit noes which are in Amsterdam in Singapore and in Montreal and you can sign up for that at height. me/ epicenter now if you use rurl and if you decide to go premium down the line it's going to get you 35% off and the Premium plan gives you a lot it gives you unlimited data you can use it as much as you want you can connect up to five devices so your whole household fits on the plan and you can use any of their exit nodes all over the world and they've got like 30 of them them and of course you can pay with Bitcoin so give it a try we would like to thank k. me for their support of eps and Bitcoin so um so like like Universal basic income uh do you think blockchains could enable enable that and how ah so I did a talk about this uh for state of the net in uh oh where the heck was it uh Milan right state of the net Milan there's I did a half hour maybe an hour talking

[32:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=1921s) Universal basic income and blockchains um pretty easy to find uh maybe I'll send you guys URL or something so my basic thinking is that it's very very easy to do Universal basic income on blockchains and blockchains are a really good medium for experimenting with universal basic income because you can record and watch all the spending to know exactly how the universal basic income was spent and as a result it becomes really really a lot easier to justify whether these programs are working or not so I I'm quite in favor of blockchains as a prototyping technology for you know these kind of radical um changes in uh social policy you know whether it's Universal basic income whether it's some kind of tax credit for people who have three children in countries with a low birth rate uh whether it's a change in retirement age if you're going to have a change in social policy that you could conceivably document on blockchains I think there are really good reasons for doing it because it allows everybody that's either for or against the change to look at the same and non-editable data set to make their arguments about the effectiveness of the policy so I'm definitely for that so for for instance like Universal basic income for might have a shape like you have a small island let's imagine a small island with two 200,000 people and they essentially done a blockchain and the issuance schedule like like like Bitcoin has an issuance schedule where new Bitcoins are issued to the miners that solve the blocks in this in this imaginary uh blockchain in order in addition to new coins being issued to the validators or miners you have coins being issued every year to each citizen on the island yes sure sure like is that a good imagination of universal basic income that sounds very much like a Aurora coin which was a project floated for Iceland Iceland's about 300,000 people in the idos are going to have some kind of system H tied to the Icelandic national ID number so in Iceland they have a national ID number called a keneta uh and everybody's kenal is visible in a basically like a phone boot context so they're never used for identifying people in any kind of private situation um but they're used for things like library cards and it's it's a really smart system it's actually quite it's quite intell ENT um because they're so public uh the assumption is not that

[34:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=2071s) your canala identifies you you know you they're never used for verifying an identity because anybody can look them up openly but they are used for convenience it's a really smart system um so yes if a country like Iceland implemented something like a r coin that had broad popular sport and it worked no reason it couldn't be tried and you could document the success or the failure of the project as it went whether it would work in terms of making a better Society I'm not at all sure because there are two problems the first is uh you redist you know redistributing wealth has a very bad history so you start with universal basic income the landlords increase the red by 20% to soak up all the money that comes in society continues exactly as it was and all that you've done is subsidize the land fors we don't know whether that will happen in practice but it certainly could happen in theory another problem is the universal basic can distributes wealth but not power so you're not going to necessarily wind up with a better fairer or a more Equitable Society because if you redistribute wealth but you don't redistribute power all that will happen is that people continue people with power will continue to change the rules of the game to benefit themselves so I think the universal basic income is probably coming it seems like an inevitable next step in social policy but I have a feeling that it's going to create a bunch of new problems and maybe that's just the nature of progress fix some problems create others so um like like that's an interesting perspective that it doesn't change the nature of power and I'd actually like to merge that with your with your earlier point about the system that we are in being lawyer capitalism so the way the way I read I read your comment is um that today due to the due to the fundamental nature of Contracting in in in capitalism what ends up happening is there's a lot of administrative cost in order to make these contracts and uh have them maintained and then uh and then have them like have the dispute settled now because of this High administrative costs the class of lawyers becomes very powerful in a society and because power concentrates in these class of lawyers and they end up having having political positions they tend to make the rules of society

[37:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuGoRdm5wo&t=2221s) even more complex they make to they tend to make the contracts even more complex because that is how their their class makes uh makes the living in the first place so it's kind of a Kind kind of a circle where you are a lawyer you be you you you become a politician you have the power to make laws and you make ever more complex laws because that's how people in your class are going to benefit and slowly the complex it of our social structure becomes way more than it needs to be yes do you know the the old joke about the Indian bureaucrats no I don't so the joke is that if you're a bureaucrat in India you know you're the head of a department when you have a a child you make a new form at the in your department and over the next 25 years the form gradually becomes more complex and it grows some additional forms and then you get some processing and then you get some regulation and uh then you get you know some oversight and by the time that you're done the form over 25 years grows into a department and then when your kid gen graduates from law school you install them as the head of the department and this is the kind of you know organic biological growth of the complexity of the Indian bureaucracy yeah yeah and it's kind of a joke but it's also kind of not yeah no I like for for our listeners like I'm I I I grew up in India and my father was in the Indian government and this is actually true it's like uh bureaucracy runs in families uh you know yeah absolutely you know my grandfather was in the government my father was I turned out to be the black sheep that's in Bitcoin doing the opposite thing yeah yeah you say you say that now but eventually the government will adopt Bitcoin and then you'll become part of the government okay okay and Cara right so uh so so what you're essentially saying is like when smart contracts we have we have an uh alternative to lawyer capitalism where you in theory you could have contracts that while they may be rigid like the cost of um cost of maintaining them the implementing them maintaining them and settling disputes is much lower than the than the system with lawyers and this can actually make Society more efficient because it uh it kind of gives you an

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