# Can blockchain solve the accountability gap? | Vinay Gupta > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [709]. 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, 2017-04-07 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcpgG9-QEFI. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected - 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): Data for accountable action. - 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,... (suggested by machine) - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (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) - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (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. (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) - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (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) - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... (through a work suggested by machine) - Topics: culture / history / fiction (33%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: open data (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2012) - Importance: core-text score 0.27 (1.00 is the top), number 293 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [800] [Lecture by Vinay Gupta at the opening event of Data in... (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/800.md): close in content (cosine 0.90) - [774] [All Power To The Imagination #10 | with special guest... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/774.md): close in content (cosine 0.90) - On the same works, just before: [237] [The Internet of Agreements (Hexayurt Capital section,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/237.md); [705] [Vinay Gupta - Thought Menu on Enlightenment (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/705.md); [159] [Taming Black Elephants (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/159.md) - On the same works, just after: [157] [The Black Elephant Challenge for Governments | IPS Commons (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/157.md); [268] [Thomas Bjelkeman of Akvo.org and Vinay Gupta of... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/268.md); [266] ["Blockchain: IoT's trust broker?" talk on the fly by... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/266.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: Can blockchain solve the accountability gap? | Vinay Gupta, video, 2017-04-07, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcpgG9-QEFI; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [709], https://guptaoption.com/texts/709.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcpgG9-QEFI&t=0s) the blockchain is a data structure to database that takes advantage of a whole bunch of little incremental innovations in computer science things like the distributed hash table on bolts them together in a form that creates a database of some new properties people talk about immutability on what they really mean is many many many copies of the data with a sort of relationship between the copies and a relationship with the past which make it impossible to edit the data analyst which is not immediately tamper obvious and a good example this would be for example the history of Wikipedia right now if you go to a Wikipedia page you can click a button marked history and it will give you a long list of all of the edits that have been made through time but what you don't know is whether some sneaky admin in Wikipedia or a state-sponsored hacker reaches into that database and silently alters the past and of course you know huxley leads to or well the primary activity of control and Big Brother society is to edit the past to change what happened in the present by retelling people their history and new forms and the boxing is extremely powerful counter to this and I think that all of the information in society that we want to have this kind of durability and resistance to attack will be stored in watch chains or roughly equivalent structures to blockchains it's my opinion that innovation tends to happen at the edges so you get this kind of sucky band google moves forward anarchists they decide the first use for the blockchain is to create a central bank of the internet and that project is called Bitcoin I think in the long run it will seen as being basically an extremely innovative temporary for wii and but when you see the Bank of England for example talking about issuing RS coin which is solid english pounds on a blockchain used for settlement between banks you can see that that's a direct descendant from the thinking embedded in Bitcoin the internet anarchists got the basic principles correctly enough that the entire world is moving probably in that direction for reasons of efficiency but also because it provides a much higher criteria for all that ability and for accountability and the place where this becomes interesting is where we begin to examine the other areas of life in which there's a large accountability gap where we know that [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcpgG9-QEFI&t=150s) terrible things are happening but we don't seem to be able to corral the data about these things in a way that gives us leverage and this gets very deeply into the heart of evidence through evidence-based policymaking on evidence-based policymaking is basically the souls the world when it comes to things like climate change our ability to actually get coherent understanding of the evidence is our ability to take difficult measures in hand to be able to change the outcomes on things like climate so one area bits of specific interest me on this is a drug trials and right now there's enormous tendency to simply never publish data sets or results which are not in the favor of the drug companies sponsoring the trials unpublished work just piled up in corridors well you know there's not really much of a strong effect what to do this again till we get something to move and obviously this seriously sabotages the statistical basis of those trials it makes it much harder to understand what medications work and what medications don't and we can assume that through the rest of science there is a strong tendency towards that kind of casual discarding of unfavorable data now we can't necessarily put a total stop to that but the idea that you would take all the data that runs through a piece of scientific equipment unlock all of the interlock train that so that it was possible then march all the runs that were made with the data that was published and say okay we've got very well to normal set of measurements that were made here was there some trial that had statistically statistically significant results that were then discarded you could begin to look towards this kind of clean room point glove sterile approach to managing water scientific data sets and I think that the idea that you could basically get a higher standard of proof in science because you know what questions were asked not simple answers were recorded I think there's a very interesting exception action and the other place for this kind of circles around and comes back to the question of trust in the state we are fortunate enough to live in a country where the vast majority of the real ugly bloodshed about civil rights happened many generations ago our forefathers fought extremely hard for the equilibrium that we now have and that equilibrium is serviceable it's far from perfect but it produced a fairly decent proclamation of rule of war for very long time but in the rest of the world [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcpgG9-QEFI&t=300s) they're saying that the you know a prince is but a stationary bond it makes much more sense the kleptocracy to the developing world I think of particular targets for this and the failure of international aid to produce any of the results that you hope to see from international aid I think largely comes down to transparency issues over kind that are entirely soluble in for example open data around spending so I quite like the idea that you could take situations in which you have an enormous number of untrusting trustworthy actors and you can lay down aware of very very strong technical trust as we've basically answering that you know most fundamental human questions where's the money and if we had a dro tickles run on those kinds of principles so you could trust the spending to the penny for every single item with total transparency but who's on the pass-through we might finally see an international aid process that was actually helpful --- End of [709] Can blockchain solve the accountability gap? | Vinay Gupta. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [157](https://guptaoption.com/texts/157.md) The Black Elephant Challenge for Governments | IPS Commons (2017); the most closely related, [800](https://guptaoption.com/texts/800.md) Lecture by Vinay Gupta at the opening event of Data in... (2022); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.