# Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin - with Vinay Gupta | Virtual Futures Salon (part 3 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [706], part 3 of 3. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2018-02-11 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn5kjVYjYvI. Text: automatic captions, uncorrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Economics behind the contracting layer.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - To bite the hand that feeds: survival (2010): Four-page essay: Nash equilibria lock each of us into breaking the world, so the way out is a new,...
  - Sharing our fear can make peace: envisaging military cooperation to avoid Mutually Assured Starvation (2012): One-page paper: the rational elites who kept nuclear deterrence stable could cooperate the same way to...
  - Coase's Blockchain: Can Equity Crowdfunding Accelerate Past Venture Capital? (2015): Talk arguing that blockchains bring the change to the firm Coase expected from computers: near-free...
  - Tell Me Who You Are: Identity, institutional memory, and the persistent illusion of the self (2015): ConsenSys essay on what identity is, and how to build identity people can live with: profiles kept apart,...
  - Dubai Blockchain Strategy (2016): Helped create Dubai's government blockchain strategy, which aimed to run all applicable government...
  - 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... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017.
  - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut...
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Ideas developed here: Internet of Agreements
- Topics: Gold, stablecoins & asset backing (12%); Bitcoin, libertarianism & the state (12%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: e-gold (6 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Coase (7 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 2 undated); Davos (3 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); centralisation (3 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); money laundering (5 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); speed of light (6 here; 20 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); synchronisation (2 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); self-sovereign identity (2 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); John Perry Barlow (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); basic income (4 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2014)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): global GDP; self-sovereign identity; radical transparency; Davos
- Importance: core-text score 0.52 (1.00 is the top), number 69 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [265] [European Parliament blockchain presentation May 2017 (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/265.md): same career work: Dubai Blockchain Strategy
  - [296] [Vinay Gupta - Transparent Society - Crowdfunding on... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/296.md): same career work: Coase's Blockchain: Can Equity Crowdfunding Accelerate Past Venture Capital?
- On the same works, just before: [653] Interview with Brett Scott - Internet of Agreements (2017); [654] Interview with Stephen Diehl - Internet of Agreements (2017); [637] Mattereum and business on the blockchain I Rob Knight (2018)
- On the same works, just after: [635] [Ian Grigg (Chamapesa) and Vinay Gupta (Mattereum) on... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/635.md); [633] [Mattereum panel at the Internet of Agreements conference (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/633.md); [729] [Blockchaingers Hackathon 2018 - Interview with Vinay... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/729.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: Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin - with Vinay Gupta | Virtual Futures Salon, video, 2018-02-11, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn5kjVYjYvI; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [706], https://guptaoption.com/texts/706.md.

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

## Passages, part 3 of 3
[1:15:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn5kjVYjYvI&t=4551s) Individual-scale solar, so solar lights – where you’ve got a little bit of solar panel, a couple of batteries and some LEDs – have revolutionised Africa, they’re saving households on the order of $100 per household per year, which is often 5-10% of their income. There are stories about areas where the solar lights arrived, and suddenly people started putting roofs on their houses, because they just had enough money to do capital investment. But you can’t get modern amenities with this kind of palm-sized solar panel; you need systems where when you want to run a heavy appliance, you’ve got something with a big battery that you can draw on that refills, and you don’t want to put one of those on your roof because you don’t use enough power and you don’t have enough money... You can sort of see that there’s a whole bunch of questions about how you get an organisation of community will around doing something that requires pooling funds, and that problem is a good fit for this technology. So I think we’re going to see a lot of capitalisation of small-scale solar and wind off that kind of technology. Question: Hi Vinay. You mentioned earlier that you thought the cryptocurrency market in general is in a bubble, and something that I’ve been thinking about a lot is what would the mechanism have to be for that bubble to burst. I would love to get your opinion on what would the actual mechanism look like. For example, with the Global Financial Crisis was a lack of liquidity. What would the bubble burst actually looks like, what would need to happen, and what’s the likeliness of that scenario ever taking place? Vinay: I think there’s basically three obvious ways it could go, and in all probability what happens will not be one of the three obvious ways. I could talk about these things as scenarios, but reality is always stranger than fiction or prediction. The first thing is that you could simply see the bubble be that somebody comes out with a new technology which is so much better than the existing cryptos that everything pulls out of one and dumps into the other. We came pretty close to the flippening last year, where Ethereum was really marching pretty hard up on Bitcoin, and if that had got much closer, I think you could have seen panic selling of Bitcoin and panic buying of Ether. I am not a financial advisor, I do not hold any of these assets, my lawyers tell me I can’t trade – okay, fine. The second possibility is that you get intervention from the state. The American government says, “Well, we’ve kind of had enough of this Bitcoin thing. Let’s arrest everybody,”

[1:18:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn5kjVYjYvI&t=4701s) and you sort of think, “They couldn’t,” and actually they could. The approach that they’d probably take is that they would suggest that the fundamental purpose for Bitcoin was actually laundering drug money, and then they’d use the amazingly enthusiastic American seizure laws to simply confiscate all of the money that anybody ever made from touching Bitcoin ever, and they’d freeze like two million bank accounts and it would be an enormous disaster, and the people that had stocked up a bunch of gold in their houses against that possibility would be sitting much happier than the ones who had it all liquid or in fiat. That’s scenario two. Scenario three is mass public disillusionment. Mass public disillusionment, right now it’s kind of hard to imagine that that would happen because everybody is making money. If people realised that the betting average on their ICOs is like 1 in 1,000, which is pretty much what it’s like for venture capital, if they start seeing the same kind of risk-return that venture capital sees... On average, venture capital loses money; the people who make money in venture capital make a huge amount of money, but the average VC fund loses money. If that turns out to be true for ICOs as well, there will be a point where people will suddenly get disillusioned and then they’ll start to bolt out of the market. So it’s only massive, massive industrial adoption of these technologies that provides any kind of stability to that bubble, and part of the reason that I’m doing the thing that I’m doing with my life right now is to attempt to build the interface into the industrial ecology so that we can actually expand into industrial space rather than being stuck in financial engineering, because financial engineering is hugely volatile. If we have mass deployment of cryptocurrencies and smart contracts deep in the industrial base solving real problems, these things become much more stable, and that’s what I’m really working on, that’s why Mattereum exists. Question: Cryptocurrency is really hot topic right now. Vinay: No kidding. Question: Bitcoin and Ethereum transactions are quite slow, but also quantum computing is really hot topic as well. In the cryptographic world we have problems with scalability, we have slow transactions. Do you think these things will be solved, to an extent, before quantum computing is complete? And once quantum computing is complete, how much of a step back or forward do you think the cryptographic world will take? Vinay: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think the Lightning Networks will turn out to be super effective, I really think the Lightning Networks are going to be a big step forward.

[1:20:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn5kjVYjYvI&t=4851s) A lot of the stuff that I wrote about Bitcoin being stuck in a technological ~back war~ and unable to evolve is true, but they finally started to take it seriously and the Lightning Networks are a good manifestation of that. The quantum computing thing, again, comes in two layers. There’s the breakability of a lot of the existing cyphers under the load of quantum computing, and I am not sure how vulnerable most of this stuff is, but the general assumption is pretty vulnerable. There are quantum-resistant algorithms, the one that I remember reading about was NTRU, and I have a feeling there’s a second generation variant of that algorithm. So you would require a period in which you took the existing cryptography, ran NTRU beside it and then migrated everything over to NTRU without losing the record of who owned what in the process. That would be a hairy job, but it wouldn’t be game-ending. And NTRU, as I say, that’s the quantum-resistant algorithm that I remember. I seem to remember that there’s a ton more computation required to do the encryption, and much, much more storage. With all that said, I think the breakthrough that’s more likely to turn everything upside down is homomorphic encryption. I think it’s much more likely that we’ll get efficient homomorphic encryption early than quantum computation early, because so much money is going into research on homomorphic encryption. If that cracks, I think you’ll see unbelievably dramatic and rapid changes that are completely impossible to conceptualise, because homomorphic encryption is so completely counterintuitive, I don’t think anybody has even written science fiction about how the world would look if that happened. So I think homomorphic encryption might turn out to completely blindside us, and I can’t even imagine what happens in the crypto space if that happens. Does anybody want an explanation of homomorphic encryption? Joking, joking! Question: I wonder if I could ask you to speak about adoption and deployment, particularly methods against intervention, or for intervention. Normally when the government or the nation state comes up in your conversation, it’s after a disaster or some kind of emergency. Are there positive steps that are government or a nation state should be taking towards some of these goals? And what would they be? Vinay: A couple of years ago a friend of mine asked me what the Dubai Blockchain Strategy should be, so I went out to Dubai, I had a chat with them, and suddenly they had a blockchain

[1:23:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn5kjVYjYvI&t=5001s) strategy and it was what I had suggested might be a good one. Now, I have mixed feelings about Dubai, it’s a really complicated place, but it’s also a haven of futurism and relative liberalism, relative to a lot of the other countries around it, and they’re not doing bad work in terms of thinking globally and trying to engineer things like solutions to climate change, they’re really putting their money where their mouth is on that stuff. What I suggested to them was that they should take all of the documents that the government issued and store them on a blockchain, so that when you came to the government with a copy of a government document that had been issued by another department, they could find it internally and verify that it was actually there. It wasn’t very complicated; it’s a big job to implement, but it’s a pretty straightforward thing to imagine. If we had multiple governments that all did that with all the documents that they issued, governments could check with each other to see whether a document was correctly issued. You could ask the American government’s internal blockchain to see whether this transcript from Carnegie Mellon was a real transcript that indicated somebody really did have a degree. That ability to just pull together all of the information about yourself with proper digital signatures from everybody that issued you those documents would make life so much simpler, and it doesn’t have to go with storage of the document. You just need to store the hash of the document, the document needs to include some way of regenerating the hash, and if you have that kind of system, you could have a system where the proof of the documents is very easy to obtain, and I think that would help everybody in a really day-to-day sense. That’s the simplest base case. If we did that for all of the governments in the world, life would improve in a really big way. Above that layer, you then get into the question of technological acceleration as national strategy. I think that would be a talk for another day. Luke: Let’s leave that to a talk for another day, and let’s give the students who did stay something to walk away with, which is my final question, Vinay: how can the students in this room, arguably the blockchain natives, how can they prepare for the possible blockchain-enabled futures? Vinay: There’s the answer which I always give, which read 1990s cyberpunk science fiction. The cyberpunk science fiction is what all of us read and that’s how we got into this stuff, and it’s really useful, because it predicted a kind of dystopian future world filled with weird nanotechnology, artificial intelligence as it were flaky and didn’t

[1:25:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn5kjVYjYvI&t=5151s) really work properly, anonymous digital cash transactions of people hacking into machines to produce political change. That stuff is really only like five years out now. That stuff has gone from being wild science fiction to being techno thrillers within my lifetime. A techno thriller is science fiction that includes the president. I think there’s a more profound question here, which is what is it like to be in a political elite? I came back from Davos, and I was not in the white badge area of the security and the heads of state and all the rest of that, I was kind of in the Davos fringe, and the Davos fringe is the most fun I’ve had in like 10 years – it was amazing! Because it was filled with huge amounts of enthusiasm, as people ran around spending their investor money, throwing great parties and telling everybody that it was a really good thing to do with their investor money. But it was filled with this kind of aggressive optimism: the future is so bright, we’ve got to wear shades. They were really pushing this notion that everything was fantastic, and this is more or less always how it is with elites. The elites have big smiles on their faces, because life is great. And the fact that we’ve got nerds, who have historically been very badly discriminated against, which is usually ableism against autists, all of that kind of nerd culture stuff is now becoming economically dominant and therefore fashionable, and the nerds are becoming an elite, and usually the elites are very nasty people. So, to me the question here is can we be a better elite than the previous generations of elites, or are we going to, in the long run, become as hated as investment bankers were for just the same reasons? That to me is a question about morals. The thing that I think is critical to nerd culture is this. The way that what I’m going to loosely term jock culture works is aggressive competition to figure out who is in charge, followed by giving orders. This is a really good way to organise military engagements, and I think that jock culture is an evolutionary throwback to tribal battles. First we have a fight to figure out who’s in charge, and then you organise everybody and you execute a strategy and you go and kill the other guys. Nerd culture I think is the people that were back at home knapping the flint, making the weapons, starting the fires, finding the food, identifying where the game was going to be, navigating long distances, building the canoes and everything else. Most of those jobs require

[1:28:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn5kjVYjYvI&t=5301s) more than a single human to be able to do the job properly. So in nerd culture the aggression is massively withdrawn and suppressed, and a lot of people find that this makes people seem kind of emasculated – aren’t men supposed to be aggressive and take up a lot of space? – the nerds pull all of that stuff in, to enable large-scale cooperation to solve problems which are too big for a single guy. Making a canoe on your own is going to take you months, you need 20 people to be able to raise a barn. To run a flint knapping economy, you need the ability to get somebody to travel a long distance to bring you the stones, you need a guy would could do the chipping and the flaking. So I think the nerds are the original co-operators, they’re the people in the human species that figured out how to solve a problem which is too complicated to solve with command & control, and I think they’ve got the emotional and the psychological wiring for that kind of collective activity. Nerds are really good at working with each other. So, I think that there’s a possibility that this new elite, which I occasionally call the Nerd Reich, is going to turn out to be much less brutal than previous elites have been, but that’s only a potentiality. We have to realise that potentiality by actually being the best version of nerd culture we can imagine, which is one in which cooperation genuinely does outweigh competition. It builds on Stallman’s foundations with open source, it builds on models like Linux, and especially Wikipedia, and it creates something which looks more like the outbreak of global science than the outbreak of one economic aristocracy overtaking another. I’d like to see something that didn’t look like feudalism being replaced by industrialism being replaced by post-industrialism; I’d like to see something that looks like the invention of the scientific method, followed by the explosion of knowledge that came with it. If we can stick true to those principles, the possibility is that nerd culture really will save the Earth. [applause] Luke: There we go, if you are a nerd, it’s going to be a good... [applause] Those are the nerds, those are the nerds... [applause] Vinay: You are my people! Luke: What a wonderful message to end on. Before we close out, there’s a couple of thank yous. I want to thank the University of Warwick Department of Economics for hosting us this evening. Virtual Futures kind of co-opted their 360 Lecture series, we do it almost every week in London, and we’re going to do more and here at the University of Warwick. I want to thank the entire team for helping us film this evening, to Pai, since you are

[1:30:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn5kjVYjYvI&t=5451s) Head of Department, for allowing us to be here. A special thanks to Ian O’Donoghue from the Theatre Studies Department for allowing us to retrofit our stage. And if you like what we do here, in terms of Virtual Futures, you can find out more about us @VirtualFutures on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. We’re looking for people to come to us with concepts. Before you leave, I want to end with a warning, because a warning is how we end every single Virtual Futures. The warning is this: the future is always virtual, and some things that may seem imminent or inevitable never actually happen. Fortunately, our ability to survive the future is not predicated on our capacity for prediction, although, and on those much more rare occasions, something remarkable does come of staring the future deep in the eyes and challenging everything it seems to promise. I hope you feel we’ve done that this evening – please join me in thanking the incredible Vinay Gupta!

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End of [706] Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin - with Vinay Gupta | Virtual Futures Salon, part 3 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [635](https://guptaoption.com/texts/635.md) Ian Grigg (Chamapesa) and Vinay Gupta (Mattereum) on... (2018); the most closely related, [265](https://guptaoption.com/texts/265.md) European Parliament blockchain presentation May 2017 (2017); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.