# Vinay Gupta - Dangerous Old Men: cypherpunk's failure, Ethereum's success > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [695]. 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/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: video, 2015-11-14 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iNiUasJiEc. Text: automatic captions, mostly 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): Ledger strand history and the identity problem. - Career works it belongs to: - Dangerous Old Men: Cypherpunk's Failure, Ethereum's Success (2015): Talk at Devcon 1, the Ethereum developer conference in London, on why cypherpunk failed and Ethereum... - The Future We Deserve: "Facebook for the Five Billion?" (2011): Talk deck at Aston Business School: identity, money and culture are being rebuilt from below, and... (suggested by machine) - People's Cloud architecture and futures in 1000 words (2013): Blog essay: the data center is doomed, its efficiency is bought with centralization and monitoring, and... (suggested by machine) - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine) - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. - 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) - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine) - Topics: Cryptography, encryption & cypherpunks (53%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (13%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: cypherpunk (7 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); certificates (6 here; 26 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); cypherpunk vision (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); identity infrastructure (2 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Cypherpunks (3 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); political legitimacy (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); world computer (1 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); DAO (1 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); digital signatures (1 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); jobs (2 here; 85 sources in all, earliest dated 2003, 4 undated) - The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): cypherpunk vision - Importance: core-text score 0.49 (1.00 is the top), number 99 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [684] [DEVCON1: Dangerous Old Men: Cypherpunk's Failure,... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/684.md): same career work: Dangerous Old Men: Cypherpunk's Failure, Ethereum's Success - [761] [Cryptoeconomics Lab: Vinay Gupta (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/761.md): close in content (cosine 0.95) - On the same works, just before: [755] [Vinay Gupta | Computers that just work | State of the... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/755.md); [757] [Vinay Gupta | Interview | State of the Net 2015 (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/757.md); [164] [Programmable blockchains in context: Ethereum’s Future –... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/164.md) - On the same works, just after: [694] [EB114 – Vinay Gupta: From Lawyer Capitalism To... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/694.md); [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) ## Reading it Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it. Cite as: Vinay Gupta - Dangerous Old Men: cypherpunk's failure, Ethereum's success, video, 2015-11-14, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iNiUasJiEc; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [695], https://guptaoption.com/texts/695.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iNiUasJiEc&t=0s) cool well up next and our last speaker of the day we have V Gupta um he will having a special guest join him I believe so uh take it away V all right fabulous hi everybody so I'm going to try and do a summary of basically my entire adult life uh as it's related to cryptography um um so I was the kind of you know archetypal teenage cypherpunk in the 1990s uh I was tangentially very quietly involved with an organization called crypto rights which was doing software to get human rights abuse State out of China around 1997 or 1998 heavily involved in the eold economy uh once upon a time I had a bearer share append only general ledger based stock market uh which was all done by you know Pearl scripts that would shell out to gpg to do the actual encryption multi-party computation kind of stuff uh but in those days there was no decentralized hash table so you really couldn't push it the rest of the way I think even hash cash hadn't been invented at that point you know there was a period of my life when the same kind of optimism and forward thrust that you now associate with the blockchain was associated with just uh you know private key cryptography right we really thought that asymmetric key in the form of https and gpg was going to provide us with all the tools that we needed to completely change the world and we were entirely confident of this and we were absolutely sure that it was a dead C that you were going to see this spread of Civilian cryptography and that you were going to see the kind of cyphon Nomicon vision of the fading away of the state and the replacement of you know uh the sort of government run domain with a citizen run domain as an historical inevitability and that period of of certainty ran right up until about 911 at which point people began to seriously question viability of that vision and then everything kind a ground to a halt really until Bitcoin so what I want to talk about a little is what went right and what went wrong in the '90s crypto era in terms of the psychology and the politics of the crypto community and what we can learn from that about what's working with ethereum and the process that restarted with [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iNiUasJiEc&t=150s) Bitcoin so the first thing that I'd like to do is the traditional evil show of hands how many people encrypt 100% of their email okay how many people could uh encrypt five or 10% of their email right thank you for helping traffic analysis so the fact that even at this point in history 25 years after the invention or the leaking of these codes we still have a position in which even the technical Elite don't encrypt all of their Communications tells us that there's a fundamental problem getting things encrypted and if you're not getting the stuff encrypted given everything we know from Snowden uh you're in a very direct sense feeding the beast in a manner that it's as direct as taxation is right we're in a position where we failed to deploy even the first run of technical measures because we say it's usability issues we say it's the software we this that and the next but the bottom line is it's lack of investment in public goods and this is the first kind of platform problem that ' 90s vintage cypherpunk H which is we had no really clear model of how one would do investment in public goods inside of a cryptographic uh sort of community worldview if you think of there as being an ass and that us was the cypherpunk movement the cypherpunks had no model of how you funded public works because the only thing that you could really do at the limit of possibility was put all of your money into an eold account and Trust the person running the eold account not to immigrate to Bolivia with the proceeds so if you can't fund Public Works in a collaborative way it's almost impossible to build infrastructure uh because you just can't pull enough money and if you've got to rely on state functions like charity to build something that has the ability to accept those funds you wind up inside of a regulatory environment that can be very hostile style to the kinds of things that people want to build and the sort of platform nature of large scale software engineering where you need a lot of people working together for a long time before you could get the kind of breakthroughs in usability or security or convenience that result in kind of Step function jumps in adoption the inability to get those step function jumps in adoption comes from the inability to keep teams in the field long enough to finish jobs uh you also the stuff recently about was it open SSL that had been on half a [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iNiUasJiEc&t=300s) programmer for years and was riddled with bugs and gpg was in roughly the same condition this is what I mean about the failure to be able to do public works because you just can't get enough people together to work on it for long enough mail pile was the most recent major effort to get a shot at long-term sustainable creation of an email client that would be able to make everything uh easy to use so we could get Mass adoption of encryption didn't manage to get that done because they could raise money at the beginning of a project in a spike but then after that you get a kind of ASM totic decay of the donations and if that long tail doesn't happen uh if the long tail if you hit the long tail on donations at the point where you no longer have uh full heavy engineering to do you could go into maintenance mode but if the heavy engineering isn't finished then the project starts how many half complete really clever crypto projects are there in the world 60 if you talk to the red centralized people they have an enormously long list of half complete cryptography projects that they're trying to figure out how to get finished so this is the first large failure of ciper pank that we didn't manage to sort out which was we didn't manage to do sufficiently heavyweight funding of Public Works and we didn't keep the money flowing in after the initial push was made which results in projects going into maintenance mode and then get locking getting locked into this kind of long slow decline as the donations begin to decrease now of course the classical way the government solve that problem is through taxation but for us it has to be solved through ongoing donation so projects like ethereum we've already established a pretty good model for the initial cash dump that gets the project started but you'll always have this problem that continuing to raise funds is difficult so one of the things I want to suggest as a key challenge is how do we make sure that you have an ongoing funding stream which is funneled into a variety of projects sum is maintenance mod mode some of creation of new systems but with the perspective that what we're doing is funding Public Works to create a new world and what I'm suggesting here is essentially that for the cypherpunk movement to succeed what we needed was voluntarist taxation we needed people to put you know a tithe of their income maybe 10% as an allocated pre-ordained amount that would be spent building a future in which people had Liberty and that if you don't make those kind of long-term structural funding decisions you wind up in a position where the [7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iNiUasJiEc&t=450s) tools get built and then they don't get maintained and if there's a bit of an overrun you end up without the tools at all obviously ethereum is in a position where we did a very large range initially and have shipped an enormous number of tools but you note that the business plan was that we would spend the money to build the stuff and then after that there were a series of large question marks about how we would sustain the foundation and you know that is an example of a situation where we've got the social fabric required to do large spontaneous raises but we don't yet have the institutional Consciousness among ordinary people that they have to continue to donate if they're going to continue to innovate so this is the first major challenge funding of Public Works and it's obvious that what I'm really discussing here is DAP based donation systems where you can subscribe to a set of projects and can can continue to inject money into those projects in an ongoing way I'm also talking about Dao based governance of those public works infrastructures because how else are you going to Su your uh you know Chief programmer departing for Bolivia with the eold not that ever actually happened but you know the kind of thing that could uh does this all make sense as a kind of starting piece this is the first of three ideas I'm going to outline in checking the time yeah we're okay this will still work so second piece I want to talk about is the great devil which is identity infrastructure uh could anybody raise their hands if they're working on an identity project right how many of you knew that the other people that you were saw raising their hands are currently working on identity projects okay everybody who's working on an identity project come and meet me at the podium at the end of this talk and say hello to all of your compatriots the idea that identity is going to turn out to be a simple problem where a small team can write a bunch of code and have a bunch of breakthroughs at the end of that process we have fixed identity is so far uh an unproven hypothesis what I do know is that there must have been 60 or 100 teams that tried that and we still have only two pieces of globally deployed uh non-state or parate identity infrastructure um maybe three so the first is the gpg web of trust um does any you feel really confident they understand everything to do with the gpg web Trust right Point's a good one so at that [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iNiUasJiEc&t=600s) point if in a room like this nobody's 100% on how the We Trust Works including me I'm not sure uh you know well because there's all this F fussy stuff about validity of revocation certificates and you know multiple levels of signatures how many you know how do you set the parameters for tertiary oh it's nightmare right so the fact that nobody understands gpg well web of trust well enough to stick their hand up in the air and say I can explain it tells you that it just didn't work for people so we've got key servers with enormous numbers of keys just piled up in them and very little verification of those keys people do key signing parties at hacker conventions even now but this is almost entirely a cargo cult activity we get together we look each other's passports we sign each other's Keys the keys go into the key servers but because the trust model is so poorly understood all that really happens is if people go to the key server download the key that has the most signature and decide it's valid if they even do that right most of the time you actually get the key by taking a look at the fingerprint on somebody's business card and that's just about all we do uh the other one of these is the x509 infrastructure uh X500 was a telepan standard x509 I think originally was a certificate structure for secure tany something like that hierarchical certificate chains where everything is signed by everything else down these pyramids currently instanciated as https so everybody is using websites with https to verify their digital signatures all the time for all the credit card transactions uh, 1500 certificate authorities recognized by the major browsers last time I checked lots of fake certificates that have been issued because of people uh spoofing identities when they went to a regist in a small country or they got a Unicode a certificate where you've got a Unicode letter you got a Microsoft domain that looks like Microsoft but one of the characters is Unicode all of these kind of things that infrastructure is rotting out to the point where somebody sneezes hard it will completely collapse and as a result we might be left in a situation where you can no longer give credit cards to anybody in the internet not that you really feel like doing that anyway because what we've discovered so far about Security on the other side of the net means that generally speaking I at least I'm very reluctant to give a credit card to anything which is not Amazon right because we've got such problems with security on the uh processor side on the e-commerce side [12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iNiUasJiEc&t=750s) we're getting into a position where we're trusting the large Brands again essentially like a cargo CP well these guys are so big there's no way they could get hacked right Amazon is not going to wind up at Ashley Madison is it but at that point we no longer have a technical trust infrastructure what we've got is a brand trust infrastructure which is completely cargo cult right we're trusting the big guys to be competent and therefore the big guys will continue to win it kills Innovation stone cold dead you just wind up with Monopoly platforms processing payments because they're security monopolies does that sound a bit like a state to you right a security Monopoly which exists as a brand because you don't trust anything else to process your payments that's essentially the core functions of the state reinstantiate as a technology company that processes credit cards right securitization so how did we get into that situation bunch of cypherpunks in the late 1990s uh the one that I knew personally got called Samir par who later on became a marine or at least tried um you know sat down and decided that they were going to build a certificate processing web server that would take advantage of all this new technology called HPS they started a tech company that was going to revolutionize payments on the internet and they were one of a few companies that succeeded in producing secure web servers the certificate authorities stood up and 15 years later one generation ation later that entire system has essentially become bankrupt we just can't trust the certificates and we can't really trust the browsers because it become so complex that you can poke holes in them really easily and we're in a constant cycle of playing cat up with people producing zero days so what went wrong right two things first thing is we wound up in a position where when the Trust Systems began to corrode we didn't build new Trust Systems so the first time we began to see actual use of fake certific in the wild was a position where we should have stood up and done something about it and built a second version of the certificate infrastructure that didn't have those problems and there were plenty of proposals for things like pinned certificates and other things along these lines but we didn't actually get a much of a push behind that even in the technology community and as a result we just allowed the certificate Authority infrastructure to degrade over time uh and to result in a position where you cannot rationally trust https anymore except on large sites with big security infrastructure behind them um the second [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iNiUasJiEc&t=900s) thing that goes wrong is that we provide a solution to the corporate world in the form of https but we never build a solution for individuals so what happens is you get this kind of pyramidal certificate deployment structure which in theory was going to support a whole bunch of stuff around what they call client sign certificates which would have extended that privacy to us so I hold up my certificate and I show it to the web server and say I want you to encrypt your communication with me with this key and that tells you who I am and if you poke around in your browsers you will find that almost all the major browsers still have this Legacy support for client side https certificates clientside x509 that nobody ever uses for anything even though it's actually really powerful stuff why usability issues essentially so over and over and over again you'll see this pattern repeat a bunch of guys hack together a solution it's good enough for industrial use it doesn't have the right set of business models to be able to sustain itself so it goes through a spike of initial capital investment and then as the capital spending begins to slow down you wind up with the base infrastructure corroding H gtps is an example of that not so much because they ran out of money but because they ran out of smart people just stopped caring and paying attention because it was a technology that worked and everybody stopped being worried about it um can you see the par to what we're building now sure you can how do we make sure that you continue to get ongoing investment in the fundamental security work underlying ethereum such that we don't wind up in a position where the system becomes insecure and kind of rots out because all of the attentions going into something else right Spike of funding at the beginning long-term maintenance problem gpg op SSL question mark question mark question mark could ethereum go the same way the Hope Is that a technology that's being used by hundreds of millions of people every day would be in a position where it wouldn't rot out but op SSL is an extremely strong indication that a security te technology without an ongoing business model that generates support ceases to be a security technology because without a constant injection of the entire lives of very smart people security Technologies degrade you don't just get them right and walk away you need constant Innovation and constant watchfulness for them to work and we're in a position right now where [17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iNiUasJiEc&t=1050s) we need to structure the ethereum effort in such a way as we avoid this Core lesson of the cipher panira which is if you don't figure out how to pay for the maintenance and the continual reinvention of your tools eventually your tools are no longer trusted right we must secure the base and that means Public Works style spending going into the core under structures that pay for the ongoing development but especially the maintenance of the core Technologies this is the Core lesson um I'm going to talk very briefly about user interface and then I'm going to come to the third hypothesis so everybody knows that user interface on security sucks however the problem with user interface on security is usually that the security model sucks and there's no way to take a security model that sucks and then put you layer user interface over the top of it and make it not suck so in gpg the suck is produced by the fact that you cannot directly attribute a key to a person you have to go person to email address email address to key so you have a twostep mapping problem and building a user interface for two-step mapping problem is a nightmare what you actually wanted was a simple mechanism human being to key and then I take the key and I look up a server and the server tells me what the delivery mechanism is that is attached to that key so you have essentially key server I signed an instruction that says send all the messages to this key that are in email format to this address and all messages for this key which are in trap format to that address does anybody know about thing called webfinger so a thing invented by a guy called bla cook who was I think the first CTO for Twitter certainly wrote a lot of the early Twitter stuff and Blaine has a technology called Web figer which basically uh is a method of finding all of the entry points for communicating with somebody using a simple protocol and something like webfinger for crypto uh would allow you to do this kind of very elegant management of I want to talk to this person this is the key I then identify all the different methods the end points for communicating them automatically then you can continue to innovate from technology to technology for communication but keep the same identities in the key space all of these usability problems when you drill all the way down turn out to be conceptual problems viciously complicated methods of thinking about the security problem that result in terrible decadent user [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iNiUasJiEc&t=1200s) interfaces you have to get back to the absolute Primal fundamentals of security design if you're going to build toolkits that Ordinary People could use how many people want to see a world with mass adoption of cryptography by civilians because you're using smart contracts and dapps if so you got nailed down exactly what you're trying to build because you cannot fix the conceptual problems in security at the user interface level they have to be fixed at the fundamental level simple clear thinking about the core idea resulted simple cleen interfaces uh the way the truth and the light on this is a standard called spki Simple public key infrastructure that lost out to both the gpg web of trust and the x509 infrastructure but it could have fixed both problems um now the final principle that I want to talk about is generative complexity and this is quite slippery and hard to describe but I think is a fundamental uh analytical tool for framing the difference between systems that live and systems that stall so the cypherpunk vision was essentially that individual to individual communication was going to result in the magical ability to construct increasingly complex social structures that would eventually rise to the point of being institutions and the problem with this approach is that it just doesn't work it ain't that way at all anytime you want to build an institution anytime you want to build a game with rules if there's any degree of complexity you wind up building things which are meta structures on top of your initial core structure so a typical meta structure would be a game of soccer in which you have a refugee a referee Refugee sorry game of soccer in which you have a referee right if you're playing cards you might have dealer um if you are playing playing chess you would typically have adjudicators and guys that manage the clock timers and all the rest of this sort of stuff um those kind of functions if you're dealing with software are played by software so if you've got mailing list the mailing list is a peer structure but you also have this meta structure which is automated which is the list manager software and that handles subscribe unsubscribe ban spam catching and a bunch of other stuff the cypherpunk Vision succeeded in building point-to-point communication tools that were theoretically effective [22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iNiUasJiEc&t=1350s) but practically speaking awful for all the enfor I mentions but what they never built was any good tools for handling meta complexity so one of the big questions it used to kick around in the late '90s was where is the encrypted mailing list manager and how will it work I got 50 people at a mailing list I want the mailing list to be fully encrypted do I encrypt a message to the mailing list which then decrypts it and Rec Crypts it to those 50 people or do I encrypt it to all 50 people client side and then send it to the mailing West manager and it sends it back out again right and I don't remember anybody ever wrote an encrypted mailing list manager that worked in either direction right there were some little fiddly problems like you had to get the mailing list with all of the keys sent to the person that wanted to send the message in such way that their mail client was able to interpret it correctly to do the key management for sending all the stuff back out again and that sounds like a trivial little problem but it was a trivial little problem that meant that we we never got an encrypted mailing list manager that worked can somebody find me some water just here oh here we are found it it's here so you get into this position where you've an encrypted mailing list manager problem that stands for year after year after year after year because it's got hard user interface problems because it's encrypted email it's a public works issue that nobody cares enough about the problem to sit down and solve it it because it's actually quite tricky and nobody's pulling money in a way that will allow them to gather the funds to get at that problem and as a result you wind up with this entire kind of cypherpunk fantasy world being run on unencrypted email over mailing lists that always had terrible problems with things like civil attacks you know sock puppets now right what we have in ethereum is frankly a staggeringly good like by far the world's best set of mechanisms for building meta structures it's like an endless Swiss Army Chainsaw for building meta structures and all the indications are that it's only going to get better at that job right you've got a whole bunch of people it's just wait you think it's a Swiss Army chainsaw now once we get blockchain scaling it's going to be a Swiss Army lightsaber so we've got the ability to generate complex social Machinery in the form of [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iNiUasJiEc&t=1500s) meta structures and that complex social Machinery in the form of meta structures should pay for the public works necessary to build the rest of the Machinery that all seems fairly simple right but this is what I mean by generative complexity right if you've got a set of systems that allow you to organize money and you can then organize to spend money to do essentially tax like or tylik payments into a set of pools which are then managed by some appropriate set of structures which then put the money into the hands of people that will spend their lives building more of those tools then you've got the potential for an ongoing ecosystem which gradually grows in complexity and I think that it's quite important to differentiate between you know dap development in either a commercial sector or a charity sector with dap development which is essentially public works right because because Public Works money looks really different from investment right it looks really different because what supports it is a different social contract between the people building the Public Works infrastructure and the people that are actually doing the support of the core structures so in the future right it would be very interesting to see if we could create a situation in which much of the utility stuff that we need every day to operate in the set systems was simply maintained by Public Works process right and I think that that might be one way of squaring the circle because we're in a position where very few of the funding mechanisms we've got access to really suit the Public Works use case which was at the heart of the cyper frun vision and I think is still at the heart of the ethereum vision we would all be deeply uncomfortable if the core of ethereum was actually commercial proprietary software and the only reason it's not is because we raised enough money to get that core Bill uh while we were still on the spike fund but in the long run what we'd like is the ability to chip away at these problems over time and build more and more interesting things and I think that's only going to happen if we can figure out how to keep the people that want to do Public Works building doing Public Works does this make any kind of sense at all as a system and we've got this fantastic set of architectures for doing Public Works systems so what I'd like to suggest is that as we kind of move forward in this we pay attention to these core lessons right we understand that keeping these systems right is as much about you know social [27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iNiUasJiEc&t=1650s) compacts and social contract theory as is about a given piece of technology it's about ongoing continual Innovation it's about cooperation between open source between commercial Enterprises between Charities individual activists and everybody else but if we're going to build this kind of kind of road to the Future stuff you end up needing systems which look a lot like local government we have a bug in this piece of software who has assigned this bug 38 million people are using this piece of software how do we make sure that the core team are appropriately paid if it is something that inherently doesn't have a business model uh that will allow you to raise a bunch of money and then spend it carefully how do you get into a position where you could keep this kind of stuff running and this is the kind of core message at the heart of what I'm saying the cypherpunks had nothing between open source and proprietary and as a result they took on the challenges which would have made them kind of sort of peer to government but didn't have the staying power to finish the job which is why there was a 10year dead period from 911 until Bitcoin and what Bitcoin created because it put an enormous injection of capital into this space where people were writing code to ensure human Freedom was it created this enormous Spike of innovation and we're in the middle of the ongoing you know boom period produced by that Spike the fortunes made in Bitcoin turn into the basic core infrastructure funding for ethereum and we continue to roll that forward the stuff is becoming more sustainable as DS become businesses and hopefully those businesses will re-inject some Pro portion of their proceeds into the maintenance and the ongoing work on the infrastructure but if we can use this wonderful meta Machinery that we have to build a social contract that allows us to continue to put funding in at the core this is how we generate the staying power to get right the way down the rest of the path and build what we all want which is essentially a world in which we've got non-state public goods which cover the needs that Humanity has that the states have never been able to fulfill and maybe in the long run we find more efficient ways of doing a lot of the jobs that the state currently does so that we can leave the state to do the hard work that nobody else seems to know how to do like running Public Health Systems efficiently but get it out of the areas where it consistently underperforms which is pretty much everything else um so I think I have two more little points and then we should stop and take a couple of questions and fingers crossed somebody very special should arri in a taxi immediately thereafter the two little details I want [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iNiUasJiEc&t=1800s) to refine are this when I say social contract I don't necessarily mean smart contract what I mean is the willingness of ordinary individuals who are making a good living out of these ecosystems to invest their money some of their discretionary spending in supporting the people that are dedicating their lives to keeping the platform infrastructure a healthy and existent right there's a real need for people to continue to plow into that work a lot of which is frankly quite D and very very difficult and on the other side The Innovation work Associated is often quite abstruse and highly Technical and you never know whether you're going down a rabbit hole or a vein of gold so you know it's about a creation of a conscious willingness to put back our winnings from these extraordinary games that we play into the Machinery that allows those games to exist in the first place right how do we make sure that vavic always has a team of guys and girls to get to the bottom of the question that he's interested in that day right it's a pretty simple question let me tell you the people that have been trying to answer that question are having a hard time with it right second piece of this how do we get into a position where people understand that although we are extremely diverse in our politics and everything else there is a fundamental sense that we know that a better world is possible and that these tools are in some sense common human Assets in the same way that Wikipedia is you know I'd really like us to see a firming up of our relationship with the other great public works you know Global Public Works processes all that the internet has produced so that people understand that ethereum is a project like Wikipedia it's a global public work it's a global public good and language like the world computer language is excellent for communicating the idea that it's a single global system what I'd like us to do is build out the rest of the story so that five years from now or three years from now when you ask an ordinary person what is ethereum they frame it as being something like wik edia rather than something like or something like Oracle so that's it that's what I had to say thank you sure questions before we before we totally conclude does anyone have a question or two for vet hey Ian where'd he go find a [32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iNiUasJiEc&t=1950s) question Ian could you find out when she's arriving come on somebody has a question don't be afraid I W bite hard how do you drive Global adoption how do you get the people using ethereum okay so question is how do we we drive Global adoption I think the answer to that frankly is that if we knew how many people were using ethereum right now we'd probably observe that it's doubling something like once every 3 months right I I suspect that if we had actual numbers uh and we were measuring the right things so it might be the number of people that are sitting in their bedrooms you know hacking away on a chunk of solidity code that they're running on a test net uh I suspect that that number is doubling every three months if it's spending in the space by larger institutions it could well be doubling every three weeks I mean it's just crazy how fast people are pouring into the space you know trying to buy knowledge and expertise I think we're worrying a little bit too much about adoption um oh fantastic come on they M so I think they're worrying I think we're worrying too much about adoption and not enough about fundamental value once we get dapps that people can use the real adoption questions will be about getting people to use the dapps but right now I think in terms of adoption of the technology we're we're basically getting adopt from like a house that is burning you know the thing is just covered in fire right now everywhere you look something goes so I don't think getting people to use the technology or invest in the technology is the hard part once there are usable dapps that we want people to get using I think all of that will change yeah okay one more short question and then we shall do the fun thing uh so who's going to like set up the the target the place where we where we tithe 1% of our wallet spending or whatever like where does that go and who's going to tell us where to point that well okay so question is how do we know who's going to you know how how who who gets to direct where the 1% is gathered and what it's done with it so I mean we have a a very fortunate thing which is that Vitalik acts as a center of political legitimacy for the entire show so [35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iNiUasJiEc&t=2100s) one possibility is that Vitalik so one possibility is that Vitalik basically gives you know some kind of a steer in that direction as people get their acts together and sort it out on the other hand fatal generally hates politics so maybe somebody needs to come up with a solid proposal and then he can basically choose not to turn it down right but this is the core question right are we a democracy are we a monarchy are we ruled by a theocrat f First Church of balic veran uh so that's a question of fundamental you know politics and I think that's a question for us to have a bit of a think about how do we want to do these things right --- End of [695] Vinay Gupta - Dangerous Old Men: cypherpunk's failure, Ethereum's success. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [694](https://guptaoption.com/texts/694.md) EB114 – Vinay Gupta: From Lawyer Capitalism To... (2016); the most closely related, [684](https://guptaoption.com/texts/684.md) DEVCON1: Dangerous Old Men: Cypherpunk's Failure,... (2016); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.