# Vinay Gupta l The Internet of Agreements l Meaning 2017

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [731]. 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, 2020-05-14 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSIEpOQIqY. 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): Explicitly links the climate-refugee programme to the agreements layer.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (suggested by machine)
  - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine)
  - Internet of Agreements (2017): Paper at the World Government Summit in Dubai on producing legal agreements at industrial scale. (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:
  - 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)
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (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)
  - 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)
- Ideas developed here: Internet of Agreements
- Topics: blockchain / global / internet (40%); blockchain / speed / light (20%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Mars (7 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Westphalia (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); peer-to-peer (2 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); identity documents (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); climate refugees (1 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); smart contracts (3 here; 110 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); contracts (4 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); refugees (2 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); commodities (1 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); markets (4 here; 159 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 6 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.50 (1.00 is the top), number 89 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [565] [Coin Telegraph AMA with Mattereum's Vinay Gupta 14th... (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/565.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
  - [562] [Vinay Gupta at The Promise of the Blockchain 2015 (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/562.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
- On the same works, just before: [758] [#3 Vinay Gupta, Indexing the physical world (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/758.md); [251] [ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/251.md); [761] [Cryptoeconomics Lab: Vinay Gupta (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/761.md)
- On the same works, just after: [683] [CommunityZ Chest - Vinay Gupta, Founder of Mattereum, In... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/683.md); [120] [blockone - Sign In (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/120.md); [723] ["Saving the Climate with Real World Asset NFTs" by Vinay... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/723.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 l The Internet of Agreements l Meaning 2017, video, 2020-05-14, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSIEpOQIqY; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [731], https://guptaoption.com/texts/731.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSIEpOQIqY&t=0s) so this is gonna be a slightly harder told tonight imagine her reasons it should be obvious I spent a good chunk of my life working specifically on how we were going to handle climate refugees I was expecting you know only order one hundred and fifty million two hundred million people and I was trying to figure out how we could use the existing set of technologies that we have the social organizations that we've got access to to manage humanitarian need on that scale and after a long time working on that what I decided was the global machinery was simply unable to conceive of taking action on that kind of issue and I've looked around for a new model of change um and the only effective actor that I could see in the world that was working with issues of that size successfully was Elon Musk so a musk was doing work that basically should have been the job of some kind of world government or the United Nations or you know the great vision for the whole humanity but he was working on that as an individual he just decided that the machinery was not there at the state level it wasn't there at the global level and so he just started building it himself and implementing I don't look to that and said well you know if it can work for space maybe you can work for the humanitarian world as well so I basically mothballed 12 years work on emergency shelter infrastructure management you know passport ring for migrants refugees all this kind of stuff they basically put all that stuff in cold storage and started working out how I could build a business that would generate the kind of reach that I needed for the kind of change that I wanted to see in the world and that was what took me into this wall chain space I was looking for the tools that you could use to solve global problems in an environment when the nation-state has turned out to be a very very ineffective set machinery at all so I'm gonna talk a little bit about the technology I'm gonna talk a little bit about what it doesn't where it's going and then I'm gonna try and tell a story about the kind of global long-term picture that we could get if this stuff actually works so I could have a quick show of hands how many people own any cryptocurrency at all Bitcoin ether anything like that we may be one in five one in ten how many people have heard of blockchain and Bitcoin and all the rest that stuff damn near everybody okay so that's the gap that we're gonna try and close today um so oh where did I come from yeah you

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSIEpOQIqY&t=150s) know this kind of stuff right started out as a technologist then went into defense security and resilience tried to figure out how to do this kind of large-scale systems protection work couldn't find the platform to do it moved into tech we really covered that um was one of the team that launched Ethereum which is also useful detail so the blockchain the real reason that this stuff exists is the Internet is very slow right it takes a roughly half a second for a message to get all the way around the world and in computer terms half a second might as well be a week and a half you can do payments at the rate of something like twenty five thousand payments a second if you're a company like Visa so the half a second delay in a message going around the world is basically ten thousand payments made and if you're working with some kind of technology which allows a payment to be made instantaneously so I send you a message and the message is immediate payment the risk is that I send a payment to Australia and well the payment is on the wire and it takes a quarter second to get there another quarter second to get back and then pay the same money to a bunch of other people and this is known as the double spending problem I take my money I threw it to Australia why would sin fight I give it to a bunch of other people then it ones in Australia and now we've got to decide who is actually got paid ad that problem-plagued electronic payments for years which is why the way that we handle electronic payments is credit cards the credit card solution that we're using is there because this kind of more advanced system I always had this bug that the slowness of the internet allowed for this kind of fraud and it was a real problem so there are a set of ways of looking at that that we've used those approximations to solve that problem the first one of those the one that's most common is called hft high frequency trading you put an enormous machine supercomputer and he say the transactions over to this supercomputer we clear the transactions in the supercomputer and the payments are made there and but then you say well where do we put all the machines which are you know instructing the trades where are your machines or my machines in that story because the closer they are to the exchange the further forward they are in the queue of transactions so what this results in is a situation in New York where you have the New York Stock Exchange and the commodities exchanges work similarly and they're surrounded by rings of computers and

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSIEpOQIqY&t=300s) supercomputers that are packed physically as close to the exchanges as possible to get the earliest response to news and to be able to trade immediately you know you get some kind of fluctuation in price all of this stuff is automatically triggered and the trading happens essentially immediately and those kind of systems are that's running the global stock markets right that's how everything is actually held together very very very old and the other approach to this is Google spanner and spanner looks at the same kind of problem how do we synchronize all this trade and it does it with atomic clocks in every data center the Google operates pretty much and they very carefully measure in the amount of time it takes for information to travel between the data centers and they've got a bunch of software that has very advanced physical modeling and at the end of that they get the ability to keep all the machines the Google operates synchronized in a way that provides services like Google Docs the ability to get you know collaboration where you're editing a document at the same time as somebody in Australia or somebody in America or you've got an international team all working on the same document what's keeping all of that stuff straightened out is a network of atomic clocks and data centers called Google spanner so these solutions are you know widely used a lot of work in the world is getting using is being done using those kind of tools but it's not the only approach that you can take the blockchain approach is not efficient has everybody heard these people talking about Bitcoin mining quick shorthand yeah so every heard the term so Bitcoin mining is basically how we solve this problem about synchronization in a way that doesn't require a single corporation to be running the entire system so the problem with the Google spanner approach is Google spanner is physically decentralized the data centers are all over the world but it's not decentralized in terms of ownership and control because it's all owned by Google so the New York Stock Exchange example it's neither physically decentralized nor politically decentralized all the power and all of the hardware in the same place so the blockchain is attempting to get both physical decentralisation the whole thing is operating globally without a fixed center like spanner but it also wants political decentralisation instead of having a Bitcoin Inc as a company that owns all the bitcoins systems in the world the thing is basically an anonymous decentralized network you take some computers you put

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSIEpOQIqY&t=450s) them into the internet they join the network by communicating with the other machines and you have a kind of collaborative consortium of you know unknown tens of thousands of people whose computers together a forum what you think of as Bitcoin and that is called decentralization it's very unusual it's kind of new human organizational structure we haven't seen anything that really works that way before except possibly markets um and it has a very broad possibility for future transformation whether it will be as revolutionary as people hope or not is an open question but when you see something which is new at that fundamental level of human society and human culture and human technology at which the possibility that something genuinely transformative will happen is realistic there is a very real chance that this stuff will be a pothole in its impact but you know it's still in the way in sea phase just because it's possible doesn't you know happen so this decentralization thing is hard to describe because the world that we're in is extremely centralized almost everything that you touch has an owner and you either are the owner or you're renting it or you're borrowing it but for the most part you know things have these kind of chains of custody that go from us to somebody else even things like your house your house sits on a piece of and if you're lucky enough to own your house you may or may not own one under your house even if you own one under your house it's still embedded within the framework we call the UK and the UK has a single point of control which is called the kraang or the the state sovereignty this sovereignty thing was more or less invented and whether you think of it as something that comes with the first human cities or whether you think of it something that was ratified and you know in the Middle Ages from the Treaty of Westphalia however you think about it the assumption that for any given part of one there must be an authority that governs what happens there and if there isn't something is fundamentally broken is an underpinning assumption that has gone from land or it might make some sense or might not into every other aspect of life we expect systems to have owners or operators and when we come across a system that just works without an owner or an operator we don't often perceive how strange and how radical that is so all the way through the 80s and 90s there was a near messianic faith in this thing that people called the free market that there

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSIEpOQIqY&t=600s) was going to be some kind of instinctive masculine that would be facilitated by price signaling and you could take a lot of the key functions of the state you could hand them to the free market and everything would mysteriously just work now I think we can all agree that that has been a project with art best myths mixed success but it gives you a sense of why people are excited about this whole decentralization thing the prospect that you could take the problems that the free market has been unable or unwilling to solve and you could deploy another thing which is not a centralized control structure but has the ability to do problem-solving at scale and you could kind of push it into the gaps it's very exciting and there are some really big gaps that that might provide us a little bit of leverage or not talk over those all later now the peer-to-peer economy right this is you know a newish thing it's always been there in a kind of informal sense and things like agricultural markets people in goods and services with each other there's always been an ability for us to seek solutions collectively without having to channelize ourselves down a specific truck there's almost been that you know implicit thing and Commons that you might have found access to things like academic libraries or academic knowledge there's a kind of global collaborative structure or we search for truth together through repeatable experiment the scientific method or historical investigation and that Commons you know scientific knowledge doesn't have a central owner there is no Ministry of Science which owns the entire world scientific knowledge it's kind of a collaborative endeavor and it is in some ways another thing a bit like the market it's it's this process that the whole of humanity is involved in and when it works well you get you know partial cures for cancer and a women it goes badly you get scientific fraud you know it's a thing that performs in some situations and not in others but we solve a certain amount of faith in science as a process so in the last 20 years really starting with Richard Stallman of the free software movement there's been a movement towards a new way of producing knowledge or with the artifacts of knowledge and they call this commons-based peer production that's your high bank words term Stallman calls that the free software movement open-source tried to depoliticize this free software movement make it more acceptable companies and

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSIEpOQIqY&t=750s) one of the fruits of the open-source movement is the Android phone operating system which runs something like 70% of the world's telephones that's free we're open-source software not sure if it's technically free software it might be so that project has been very successful you know you're all using open-source software every time you use the internet for example because most of the backbone machines that run the fiber-optic cables and so on are open-source and the idea that this kind of peer production approach is capable of doing large-scale problem solving has been pretty well proven by Android and before that with a success of the Internet as a medium you know we know that together we can do this kind of work and it can succeed and it can change the world albeit in small and always so we have the market we have science we have open-source software and then along comes this thing that everybody calls Bitcoin and Bitcoin is where we begin to see the real direct incursion of this commons-based peer production directly into the machinery of market capitalism somebody figures out how to use peer production to produce money and not to earn money you know where the money is produced by the central reserve bank or it's produced by the Bank of England not to take the money that somebody else has made in some kind of mysterious legal process but to actually just produce money and if you think about it that's a remarkable thing you know the idea that you just have a group of people get together and create currency kind of a surprise you used to be very common that kind of stuff used to be how the world worked there's all kinds of histories about large stone wheels and carved shells cultures have always hard ways of you know creating tokens for trade because carrying stuff around has been too heavy but it's not happened in a long time and to have some people figure out how to do it at internet scale was really quite revolutionary and this is going back you know more than half a decade now it's been a while since that breakthrough was made it's been incrementally refined it's been polished there's been a whole bunch of work on taking that license to print money and making it more and more and more effective and this has produced a thing called Bitcoin so let me explain a little bit about how the Bitcoin thing works just to sort of give you some sense of the the underlying architecture the thing which is happening under the

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSIEpOQIqY&t=900s) surface that produces this strange effect so you have a global computer network which is large it's on the scale of the computer networks of Google or Facebook or Amazon you know it's a thing that exists in the form of endless warehouses consuming enormous amounts of electricity and what it produces is a bunch of computer you know the the there are no direct services produced it's not like these computers are loading webpages they're engaged and an enormous collective grind to produce security for this currency and what they basically say is unless you've got more computer power than all the machines which are in the Bitcoin network you won't be able to fake a transaction you can't fraudulently spend other people's money unless you could do more computing than the entire Bitcoin network and the expenses of the people running those machines are paid for using Bitcoin so when the Bitcoin network was small and the money wasn't worth very much when Bitcoin was trading for you know two or three sands rather than $7,000 and the machines that were securing the Bitcoin network were not very numerous and they weren't very specialized it was you know hobbyists with a couple of dishes decent machines sitting in a hall closet and those machines would produce you know five or ten dollars a day and that was enough to pay the bills for the electricity and it was enough to pay for the hardware it was a couple of thousand dollars worth of graphics cards and Bitcoin rapidly moved from that phase to having custom silicon chips made and then the custom silicon chips wound up in a very large warehouses were heavy engineered cooling and every time more people wanted to buy Bitcoin and Bitcoin became more expensive securing that coin became worth more money so people spent more money to secure it and so there was a kind of incremental stepping ratchet where when Bitcoin was worth more money people would spend more money on computers to secure it and then once people were sure that that new level security was in place the currency would rise again so this is a very very capitalist system it's very very very market-based and as a result it's been able to compete very effectively in a market-based world it's not really a utopian project under direct sense it was a machine that was made to survive capitalism and it's done very well but it survived capitalism largely by being capitalism and that's a really important

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSIEpOQIqY&t=1050s) thing to understand a lot of people come to Bitcoin with a very utopian vision of how this is going to transfer humanity but it is unlikely that the cure for capitalism is more capitalism you could suggest that that are certain miss features of capitalism that a better capitalism would cure and I think it's reasonable to talk about Bitcoin as being a potential approach to taking some of the problems in capitalism and getting rid of them but the problems which are inherent to capitalism are unlikely to be solved by Bitcoin or things which are too closely related to it right it's a market system however what it has done is the entire kind of Bitcoin and associated world is currently worth about two hundred billion dollars so in the past less than ten years two hundred billion dollars has been printed by a collective of nerds and it wasn't it wasn't that they made companies and then sold the companies for dollars they skipped that intermediate stage where you make companies and they just sold the dollars they just sold the Bitcoin it's remarkable when you think about it I mean it does sound a little perpetual motion machine and it you sort of think well but I mean can that possibly be right and the answer is nobody's quite sure it works it's here it's demonstrably successful by all the metrics that we measure these kind of projects by but there is still this thing where you kind of stare at it and you're like that can't that can't actually be what it looks like it's exactly what it looks like and in the long run we look back at moments like that and we call them revolutions you know heavier-than-air flight was impossible it was impossible only birds and insects could have heavier-than-air flight it was thought to be something that was forever outside of the reach of human beings and you know I can't remember the exact quote but the you know the feeling that heavier-than-air a fight would never happen was the common scientific opinion off the day and then the Wright brothers who haven't really been told it's impossible go out there and they do it and at that point everybody's kind of looking around like what do you mean it fly yes no it totally flies you're kidding no no they're really doing it how does it work it's basically like a motorcycle with wings I can't possibly work no no

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSIEpOQIqY&t=1200s) but it really does and then you come back you know 50 years later and the entire world is dominated by flight so that's sort of what's happening with Bitcoin it's a revolution in that you stare and you keep staring at it and it doesn't get any more sensible and it doesn't go away and you know once you've got a couple of generations of kids who've grown up with that thing always the air they're just gonna turn around and be like but what are you talking about it's almost been this way because it's only the people that are in that bridge generation when something went from being impossible to being possible that get the experience of this revolutionary feeling of I just don't understand and this doesn't make any sense after that bridge generation and I know a couple of kids who are 15 or 16 and they've made a I think maybe one's 15 ones 18 they've made more money than their parents have made in a decade Trading what started out as pocket money you know and for them this is normal well yeah of course we just keep a really close eye on the markets and you know every time we got some pocket money we'd be buy some more coins and you know pretty soon they're paying their way through University on the basis of trading peer-to-peer currencies and for them that's totally normal they don't think of it as being strange tall it's always been there for them they hit adulthood at the same time as these technologies went mainstream so for them these technologies are mainstream so as we move forward what you're gonna see is a generational divide where there are people that just look at it and didn't understand it and weren't curious there are people that saw it come over the horizon and get very engaged and try and figure out what it isn't how to use it and how all work and then they'll be people for whom it's always been there we used to talk about digital natives now what you're going to see are Bitcoin natives or crypto natives and you know it's important to understand when you start meeting these people that they're not mad and they're just young and you know we have to sort of make allowances for the fact that for them this is totally normal the world has always been this way now it gets worse so now we have this system where we have a kind of global transactional logging thing right everything you know is in this big computer network and everything's linked

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSIEpOQIqY&t=1350s) to everything else and the project that I was part of is called Ethereum and if you're in cable one a few years after a Bitcoin and said well that's really fun but what if it was programmable Bitcoin was like a bank account you hard coins you could receive payments you could say into payments well that's ok but why can't I write a little computer program that figures out when something should be paid you know suppose I want a director but I want to be make a payment once a month well while can I have a program that does that well just run it on your laptop what if my laptop is closed what I want to do is I want to take the logic for that repeated payment and I want to put it in my bank account kind of like you do with a standing order so the idea of writing little computer programs that do things like standing orders and putting them in the bank account kind of lodged with the bank or me there's no bank but kind of lodged with the bank gave rise to this idea of Ethereum we're going to make a programmable blockchain so you have this network the big computer network is called a blockchain you have the big computer network but now you can write little programs that run and for historical reasons these little programs are called smart contracts and smart contracts are not particularly sophisticated yet they're nothing like legal contracts they're really much more like standing orders programmable payments or programmable money or good ways of talking about them so the kinds of things you can do with smart contracts that you can't normally do or relatively simple things so um for people who are buying and selling across currencies you can do things like have an order that when a particular currency becomes cheap you automatically buy some of it but that's isn't run by a broker or a dealer it's kind of inherent to the fabric which is carrying the payments really programmable money um you could take an example for something like take a gambling game right if two people want to play poker on the Internet they're either trusting somebody to sit in the middle of their poker game and take the payments from both sides and deal the cards but if you're very very very clever you can write a smart contract that basically generates the cards and takes of payments and transfers the money to the winner when the game is over and that sort of stuff sort of has limited utility they don't have that many people that enjoy poker but you know the sort of seed of the idea is there that if you could do it for poker maybe you could do it for auctions and if you do auctions that have this kind

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSIEpOQIqY&t=1500s) of automated logic and instant payment and all the rest of the attributes you get from these things you begin to think like maybe that's a part of the real world and you know if you had a system where you had the ability to do an auction but it didn't go through something like eBay you know eBay charges quite a lot of money for hosting auctions it's something like 10% of all the money that goes through Ebates stays with eBay and that's why you pay is an enormous company well the buyers and the sellers are paying through eBay to exist in the same way the buyers and the sellers are paying for uber to exist in the same ways that the buyers and the sellers are paying for Airbnb to exist so quite a lot of people who are involved in this whole space blockchains and cryptocurrencies and all of these things are looking at those enormous companies as potential inefficiencies in capitalism that could be pulled out and replaced you know if you have something that works like eBay but it's 10% cheaper you will tend to shop there if you're something looks like Airbnb and it's 10% cheaper you'll tend to shop there and these things because they're living in this global computer network rather than inside of a specific cluster of servers somewhere these things have a certain magical property which is that they're global by default they're everywhere from the day that you launch them and the services are universally available and this is quite interesting because you think about the edge of the network you know we're not really very good at going beyond say the two billion richest people on earth wouldn't we begin to talk about the Internet and the services that it provides but if you're in a position where you know some bunch of kids build a hotel rental website for California but it's actually on the blockchain and its global by default it's just born global and then you discover that you know folks in South Africa are using it to you know rent housing to each other and then the next thing you know it's Molly and then you realize that it's being used in villages all over the world for some completely unintended purpose the that kind of output an outcome is much more likely with blockchain than it is with the conventional sort of website model the fact that these networks are inherently global the fact that all the logic is kind of buried in the payments architecture the fact that there is no real recognition of international borders in these systems because they all operate embedded in the Internet they don't see the world as a set of

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSIEpOQIqY&t=1650s) countries they do see as an enormous global network all of those things point to the possibility currently very far off where they point to the possibility that you'll begin to see global service architectures that run on these systems not just the payments which we already have and they're being used very successfully in a lot of poorer countries but also the possibility that the services which are built on top of those payments will turn out also to be global by default and that that will turn into a very substantial development bonus very early days right we're at the point where we've just about got the thing off the runway we've given it a few kind of scoots around but in terms of the size of these systems you know 200 billion sounds like a lot of money but the total value of all the things in the world that have prices is said to be 700 trillion dollars so we're in a position where we're only at the very very beginning of this kind of digitization of money this is only the start now the last thing I want to talk about is the really ambitious goal we'll make a project so we would quite like other species to send some of our monkeys to Mars but maybe we just want to look around maybe just you just want to say that we did it maybe it turns out to be possible to live up there and make a living up there and we could go out there and we could do a whole bunch of the nasty dirty planet-destroying Industrial Engineering that we're currently doing than earth and we could do it in a place which has no living things to disturb right and you sort of think you know actually if we had another planet that didn't have any trees or soil and there was nothing you could poison maybe we could take a whole bunch of these filthy industrial processes and just do them there and if we're going to be able to do that in 50 years and you just sort of have to start thinking about it now it might require technologies like space elevators but they're also people working on that kind of stuff you know one way or another you go from the Wright brothers with this single plane that looks like a motorbike with wings to the entire international air travel system with tens of thousands of airports and hundreds of thousands of planes and billions of passengers a year that happens in 50 years so for people today to be looking at Mars I'm thinking you know what if I don't think it's gonna take 50 years from Mars to get really interesting I think it may only take 20 years and half of the people in

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSIEpOQIqY&t=1800s) this room have a mortgage which lasts longer than that so you know if you sort of think of this as like could there be people living and working on Mars by the time I pay off my mortgage yes they're really good so I think that we could do this kind of global project financing and organization stuff using these Global payment architectures like Bitcoin and Ethereum and the other things which we per build it everybody in the world that wants to see Mars happen put some money into a-ha and if they successfully go to Mars and it turns out to be enormously profitable for some as yet unspecified reason everybody they put money into that huh gets to take more money out of the hub but it would have to be done in a really well-organized global way and so much money is required that I think you'd have to be able to fairly easily take money from anybody on earth for any reason who wanted to put money into those particular hats you know if we're passing the hub to build a spaceship to go to Mars it's going to have to be a very big heart and it ought to be global because we're doing it together it's a thing for the entire human species um you could say the same thing about climate change we're having real problems finance and climate change because everybody's pointing the finger everybody else is saying well why don't you pay for it but if we had clear global records about who was emitting the carbon who was benefiting financially from the carbon being emitted if we could visualize that whole carbon economy and with computers you can do things like that if there's the will to do it then we could also start talking about having large-scale global visualization of the mitigation efforts when we're working on trying to stop these kinds of problems we could have a global visualization of the problem and we could have a global heart into which the money is put to buy a solution and because of the you know extremely secure record-keeping that these Bitcoin blockchain systems have that would allow us to clearly identify where the money had been spared same thing applies to things like the migration problem if you want to be able to issue passport type identity documents to everybody on earth if you've already got a system that's capable of storing data and this completely secure global way you could attach the identities to those systems and if you've got the right kinds of secure around her you could have a global identity system that gave services to

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSIEpOQIqY&t=1950s) people that couldn't get those services from their nation-states so there are a set very large global problems that are largely above the pay grade of the nation state the sovereign entity that we're part of the UK really doesn't work at the global level very much you know it's got a certain amount of outreach I think there internationally budgets about two percent but more or less the UK sovereign government exists to organize affairs that are in the domestic arena we have a shore if it's inside of our sure we're kind of responsible for it and if it's outside of the shore somebody else ought to be taking care of that but the somebody else's are not doing such a great job on a lot of this stuff so the sort of notion that you could build these kind of lightweight large global systems is not fundamentally unrealistic you know Wikipedia really did make a pretty good stab or organized in all of the world's knowledge into us or coherent searchable findable thing it's not all of the world's knowledge it's not perfectly representative there are weird corners where it's good you know and those amounts of unnecessary detail or trivial things and big holes where it hasn't covered something important but as a first approximation it's not bad and their budgets only about five million dollars a year it's not a very well funded organization it's doing great work so the idea that the response to climate change and space colonization and global and sort of identity and care for poor people could be these enormous global machines which are largely run using the Global payment infrastructures that are very lightweight and self-organizing and that are closer to you know Wikipedia than say the New York Stock Exchange this doesn't seem unreasonable so whenever somebody talks about Bitcoin or the blockchain you hear people talking about this remember we're still at the sort of motorbike with winning the stage of the engineer it's very early days we do have prototypes they do fly they're carrying a few hundred billion dollars worth of transactions and that's quite an impressive thing but it's compared to what we're going to see over the next five 10 15 20 years I think we're going to see this as the Wright brothers phase of the blockchain ecosystem this huge global computer network that we're putting together is the next stage of the internet it is going to solve problems that the existing generation of the internet can't solve and if we get it right it might really help with some of the

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiSIEpOQIqY&t=2100s) global problems that we're currently unable to face thank you [Applause]

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End of [731] Vinay Gupta l The Internet of Agreements l Meaning 2017. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
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