# Vinay Gupta - How Blockchain will change our global system in the next 10 years | BIC18

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [732]. 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, 2018-06-15 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TlmhSl7jQ. 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): Futures for state roles.
- 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)
  - 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)
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (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)
  - 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)
- Topics: Blockchain infrastructure & theory — databases, semantics, identity & trust (36%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (29%); blockchain / global / internet (21%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: global trade (11 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); internet globalism (3 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); special economic zone (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); standards (6 here; 87 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); economic zone (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); Julian Assange (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); semantic web (1 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Wall Street (1 here; 24 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); platforms (1 here; 76 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); contracts (2 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): special economic zone
- Importance: core-text score 0.32 (1.00 is the top), number 230 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [678] [WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with Vinay Gupta (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/678.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
  - [566] [Why Global Trade Will Inevitably Move To The Blockchain (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/566.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
- On the same works, just before: [622] Amy Bell - Identity - Internet of Agreements (2018); [623] Rutger van Zuidam - Identity - Internet of Agreements (2018); [625] Rob Knight - Identity - Internet of Agreements conference (2018)
- On the same works, just after: [41] [21 Jun 18 Space – Internet of Agreements (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/41.md); [618] [Vinay Gupta - Space - Internet of Agreements (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/618.md); [619] Katherine Courtney - Space - Internet of Agreements (2018)

## 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 - How Blockchain will change our global system in the next 10 years | BIC18, video, 2018-06-15, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TlmhSl7jQ; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [732], https://guptaoption.com/texts/732.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TlmhSl7jQ&t=0s) we started with a big idea Dave birch and a lot of other ones saying hey this this whole crypto in the blockchain thing is really you know going to get too much bigger areas it was some people thought it was horrible like Richard says oh my god the the Wall Street guys are coming but it's gonna be growing and important it's going to be important for for innovation we're rethinking society and Finnick Gupta has been very active you know he was very much involved in the the most you know powerful platform at the moment the Ethereum and I asked him can you think about a society ten years from now and how it will change so he's our last speaker give him a big hand veenai thank you very much for coming so

[0:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TlmhSl7jQ&t=45s) I'm going to talk a bit about the structure of global trade because fundamentally the the VOC Cheng's primary impact is either going to be on global trade or it's gonna be nowhere at all if we can't do something about the conditions of global trade what we will see is the collapse of globalization and a massive drop in living standards as well as the collapse of our ability to do international coordination to deal with threats like climate change and this is not a theoretical possibility this is an actual lived reality right the the set of cultural forces which led to the UK designing a drop out of the EU are also causing problems in America around NAFTA there's an enormous amount of pressure caused by the collapse of the trans-pacific partnership agreement we're in a position where the current model of globalization is no longer a safe or sustainable and the factors that cause that are complex but it basically comes down to the desire that individual nations have for sovereignty and control and an international regime which has served some people a lot better than others so while all of that has been going on in the trade area at the same time the internet has continued its forward march into every aspect of life with enormous transform of impacts so the first thing I want to say is the vogue chain is simply the next generation of the Internet right it doesn't replace the Internet it doesn't extend the Internet it's just the Internet gets better and it's been getting better for really at this point thirty years it's had consumer facing services at scale for about twenty years social media is now about ten years old the Internet continues to evolve it continues to change it continues to pull people closer together and at the end of the day what is the blockchain it's basically just a way to email money or potentially goods to people there's a bunch of magic on the back right and that makes it possible that the bottom line is you say you want to move some money some data some proof of ownership for goods from one place to another you drop them into this piece of software it moves all the cryptography and all the rest this stuff are lined up in a way that make that movement your tangible visible permanent everybody is happy with the results now on one hand that's not that big a deal on the other hand can only be the amount of trying to get around the modern world now without

[3:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TlmhSl7jQ&t=195s) access to maps on your smart phone and search how do we know things could you imagine going to library every time you need to look something up it seems unimaginable cities completely impossible to navigate without little guidebooks I need to look up the addresses and try and figure out where you were and where you were going and looking at street signs trying to resolve things getting in taxis because you just know we're figuring out where you were so there are huge changes in the structure of our lives so social media how do you keep track of your relatives you know your aunt's cousin you're never going to find these people again a Facebook vanishes so although these changes are incremental they're also revolutionary because once you're up on these new platforms everything which came before is forgotten it vanishes so if you look forward to kind of future in which the all-singing all-dancing blockchain trade system has have become real the idea that we could you know go backwards to enormous stocks of paper duct-tape to the front of container ships you know it just doesn't make any sense right once you've gone into the new systems the old systems look absurd so from the future of ten years forward the first you know thing the first core lesson is that the existing systems that we use for managing global trade will look absurd it will be unimaginable that we ever did things the way that we do them today in ten years and that's true for almost everything that the internet comes into contact with once you've had the internet for a while what ever came before however you used to do it just becomes so up so we you can't even imagine it was there and it happens really quickly right and builder members of the audience do you remember when telephones were all connected to walls right how long ago is it the telephones were connected to walls it's about 20 years right and in 20 years the idea that telephones would ever be connected to walls can you hundred future people you know next year there's going to be some new legislation all telephones will be permanently connected to a wall unthinkable right telephones before they were sparked unthinkable so there's a compression of time where we just get used to the way that things are that totally removes all kind of sense of history all sense of stasis we're moving into the future

[5:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TlmhSl7jQ&t=345s) moving into the future very fast and when we look backwards what we're doing right now we'll just make no sense so I want to play a short video that is kind of a little bit of a story about that future right and it doesn't really matter if you know the details are kind of unimportant but wouldn't you think about is the sort of pacing of the future and the tone of the future how quickly is the future coming and you know what's inevitable and what's kind of all to play for right so inevitabilities you know rationalization of global trade and global finance and the ability to deploy computers to track things in a much more fine-grained way all that stuff is completely inevitable it doesn't matter whose version future you're looking at it has all that stuff in it what's inevitable what is the play for what is coming quickly what is coming slowly right so let's play the video and then I'll talk a little bit more about where the blockchain really fits into these stories what would business on the

[6:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TlmhSl7jQ&t=410s) blockchain look like smart contracts open up a vast new space for automation not just for money and digital assets but also physical assets intellectual property and services the potential market is huge but how do you connect code with physical assets what happens when there's a bug or when real-world circumstances change in ways we didn't expect to put business on the blockchain we need the right legal and technical foundations to support it this is what Mattereum provides with its platform for decentralized commercial law by combining smart contract code with the necessary legal terms business can be automated while ensuring the correct interpretation of everyone's obligations when something goes wrong take a container of goods sailing from China to Europe a smart contract records its movement from factory to shipping agent to customs officer to warehouse automatically generating relevant documents and paying fees and taxes but if something goes wrong along the way the shipment is delayed or the goods are not what was expected the content of

[8:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TlmhSl7jQ&t=480s) this video really doesn't matter right this one happens to be hours that are probably 50 companies with basically equivalent videos they'll talk about their specific part of that story but there's a general agreement that the future of global trade looks something like this pretty much everybody in the industry knows so that's how it's gonna go the port people have one emphasis the wall people have another emphasis the blockchain people the third emphasis but what everybody is looking for in that space is a uniform global trading system that allows you to move goods and services and financial products from one place in the world to another place in the world with an absolute minimum of manual processes in the middle and with all the kind of located messy legalistic stuff handled by automation does anybody doubt that that is the global direction of travel does it not seem kind of obvious right you ought to be able to pick up a telephone and call anybody in the world you're too evil to email people money you ought to be able to order boxes of things from China and have them actually arrived this is obviously what's gonna happen right the blockchain solves some of these problems I have process automation using things like AI solve other problems you know new robot poor infrastructure fixes third problems international treaties bilateral agreements you know port port networking whatever it happens to be solve other problems in that space but this is the kind of inevitable push of history and unless something dramatic goes wrong that's where we're going right and this is sort of the easy stuff right well you know wearing my futurist heart rather than my CEO huh the easy stuff is 10 to 20 years from now we will have taken a whole bunch of these awful paper legacy systems and we will have gotten rid of them easy right

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TlmhSl7jQ&t=600s) maybe not easy to do but it's easy a predictor that's where we're going now the tricky questions are what currency are we going to use to pay for stuff it right is it all going to be handled using the existing fiat currencies is it going to be handled using Chinese money rather than dollars is it going to be Special Drawing rights on the world bank model is the EU going to issue a currency we're gonna pay for all for face it with face book bucks right very interesting question the technology doesn't change very much depending on what the payment instrument is but what we're beginning to see here is the intersection between the technology and the politics right there are 50 different ways that you could do this a technical level and at the end of the day they'll all work about the same right nobody really knows you know exactly how this stuff operates at a low level but you can tell what kind of future we're going into then you ask the question about what are we going to pay for it and suddenly that is electric uncertainty is the dollar gonna be the future of global trade in the way that is be in the past is it going to be completely displaced by the Chinese one belt one road program is there even going to be a Europe right political uncertainty technological certainty the

[11:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TlmhSl7jQ&t=680s) technological trends are pretty easy to forecast because we've got at this point thirty four years of the internet pushing forward down a technological track and pretty much everything that the internet touches winds up looking like the Internet right fast cheap efficient traceable trackable it all kind of fits together in a story but at the point where you get the political interface this is for you enormous amounts of uncertainty right so a second question right we agree there's uncertainty about the payment instrument is it all going to be on a single public chain where everybody can see everybody else's transactions right down to the nickel you know some enormous Lee accelerated global blockchain or is it going to be on private chains which are operated one per company or one per trade network maybe it's gonna be one chain per commodity class maybe it'll be one chain per structural partnership right or is it gonna be a single global system or is it gonna be something in between the we haven't seen before right are the nation-states going to be heavily involved in the convening of those systems or are the nation-states going to be largely hands off in the way that they largely hand off hands off the internet to date right huge areas of uncertainty there so for I'm guessing people want is a really strong sense of what's gonna come and what I want to point out here is that there are areas very high certainty and there are areas are very low certainty there is of high certainty are everything the internet touches looks like the internet right what does it look like when you just figure out ways of dealing with all the logistical problems in international trade in the same with the Amazon pulled out more or less all the logistical problems in ordering things off catalogs right the methodical process of applying process improvement and new technology investment to these kinds of problems results in the same kind of solutions it's the same kind of logic that makes all cars look roughly the same because when you use the same software and the same standards for aerodynamic drag there's only so many shapes you can make this is the certainty the uncertainty is all the political stuff no the vote chain comes from a political philosophy

[13:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TlmhSl7jQ&t=820s) that I call Internet globalism right it really starts back in the 1990s when people talk about the things like the Declaration of the independence of cyberspace there is this notion that the Internet is a separate political place and in that separate political place people should be free to say anything they want to say and they should be able to think any thought they want and you know information doesn't cost anything to transmit really so things ought to be free of cost and that was the kind of early utopian version of the Internet I'm not run for a good long while and it gave us things like Wikipedia and the free software movement that have been enormously globally transformative then post 9/11 you end up with much more stress and much more conflict between this kind of internet utopianism in the real world and this culminates in an escalating series of exchanges um first Julian Assange then Manning then Edward Snowden right and that rapid increase in volatility and violence between the internet globalist and the state it has been hugely definitive of the situation to which Bitcoin emerges the early users of Bitcoin that give these currencies their value are people trying to send money to WikiLeaks to get around the payment embargoes that had been set up in the banking system by Visa that's where the early users decided this stuff was gonna be worth something I know here we are in you know a center of the you know state regulated financial sector kind of talking about the transformative potentials these these technologies well there are certainly transformative potentials here but you know we're no longer in the kind of pedestrian safety er of the Internet we're now in the volatile political era of the Internet when the way that these things go could affect the balance of power between the superpower trading bloc's you know GDP are is an enormous diversion of the flow of history because it implies that there will be a european-style of Technology and an american-style of technology and that there will be different right it's an incredibly bold play by the EU and I hope it's successful so we come to this blockchain and we say one more time what is inevitable and wants to be played for so there are basically two ways that the nation-state can respond to internet globalism the first way is tariffs and barriers and an attempt to prevent the smooth integration of all of

[16:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TlmhSl7jQ&t=970s) these global systems into something that just routes goods and services as smoothly as the internet routes information and that approach will eventually result in isolationism it will result in states which are disconnected from the trading network as states that have strong national firewalls are from the internet you know there is a Chinese version of everything you could get away with that if you're china you can't get away with that if you're the size of Switzerland right countries like France are kind of in the middle they might be able to swing it they might not so you either have a smooth fluid connection with the international trade network as the blockchain kind of builds it out or you wind up with these kind of attempts to maintain local sovereignty by putting up all kinds of barriers the other model is that you embrace these networks and extend as much national influence onto them as possible and this was basically a very successful approach all the way through history every time there has been a new network over what human beings can exchange value whether it's roads rail telegraph right the International shipping Network I mean you're a nation which is pretty much defined by your ports right um in these instances what happens is you get an extension of your national characteristics into the rest of the world right so I think that we can assume pretty safely that there's going to be a global trade backbone which does for the information layer of trade what containerization did for physical goods standardization payment rails semantic web concepts pulled onto the blockchain international standards for foreign contracts at the 10-year horizon all of that stuff will have gotten done and we'll all be using it and not using it will be as crazy as going back to phones or plug into walls the national strategy questions however become acute because if we wind up with a bunch of global competing standards to do blockchain stuff in different ways in different places you don't get the smooth end to end transmission right if half the world run with one Internet standard and the other half Rama or another and you end up with a series of Gateway boxes and the thing wasn't really end-to-end it would be a massive constant drain of resources dealing with those split points and whether we wind up with one two three four or dozens of these kind of trading domains once all this internet trade stuff is locked in is a completely open

[18:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TlmhSl7jQ&t=1120s) question right whether we can figure out a relationship between the more entrepreneurial nation states on this on coming internet globalism which gives the entrepreneurial nation-states an opportunity to shape that globalism as it approaches I think is the hot topic and the Netherlands is ideally positioned to do that right hugely entrepreneurial massive national will behind blockchain had a very long and successful history of shaping trade right this is potentially yours right there's an enormous opportunity to take the things you know about global trade and to apply them to this oncoming

[19:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TlmhSl7jQ&t=1160s) blockchain space and that's not just startups and it's not just government it's every sector of civil society to every sector of finance because it's not that you have to push the inevitable into being yourselves it's not like the entire burden of getting this thing to run is on a single nation's shoulders right there are rooms like this one in every country in the world most of them are you know aggressively forward-looking a few little bit more kind of break yeah kind of slow down hang on how are we gonna do this but generally speaking the movement is aggressively forwards the question is how do we steer end right that's a question of national strategy in to some degree corporate strategy how do you steer it and the only way is you have to go first right you have to extend forward into the story because the first person in the space is the person that gets to set the standards but that whole kind of technical standardization process the ways that we handle trade all of those kind of systems are based on world view and perspective and culture you need some story about what's happening at the end of the story before you can decide how you're going to do the next part right every phase you have to be looking towards a goal so my suggestion is that we make a very very clear image of the future that we want because otherwise we're going to get a kind of future that happens by accident and the future that we want is a future where we really do have a global trading system which is as easy to use as the internet is now for sending information we want it to be fair we wanted to be non-discriminatory we want it to allow nations to assert things that they will and will not permit on their soil successfully but we don't want the cost of erecting those kind of national barriers to be excessive we want it to be easy to say you can't import that to our country it contravenes our health and safety regulations we want all that work to be done by machines right however the payments are managed we don't want there to be constant currency volatility in a way that makes it hard to get the deals done we want it to be easy to buy and sell and that's not a terribly controversial thing but if we all work together globally with that goal in mind it should be much easier to avoid the kind of international snarls that could result in three or four or five global trading bloc's rather than a single end-to-end harm

[21:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TlmhSl7jQ&t=1310s) and that to me is the big question about the future do we wind up with a single system that supports many currencies and many laws and they're interoperable or do we wound up with separate systems each one balkanized by legal norms and by payment standards and those decisions are going to get made in the next probably three to five years and places like Port of Rotterdam could be at the very very forefront of helping paint the picture of a single integrated global trade system that supports local diversity but doesn't result in balkanization so that's how I think it's gonna look in ten years and the decisions get made in rooms like this one and thank you very much for having me today [Applause] right Dan Vina thank you very much do you what what scenario do you think

[22:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TlmhSl7jQ&t=1370s) will be likely so I think most of this really revolves around the US and China the one belt one road project is incredibly ambitious and very very powerful and if this turns into a joining together of models in the same way that you could start a bridge from both ends join them in the middle it should be fine but if it turns into a situation where you've got two separate bridges and they're kind of passing each other now you have a problem because the one which is complete at first this is the only one that will ever be completed so whether it's cooperation or a race condition is an open question um you know multilateralism is a very very difficult thing but once it's done it's very very stable do we want a unilateral global trade system or a multilateral wonderful multilateral one we have to cooperate really effectively including with the Chinese model seeing the leadership in both blocks what did it give you well I'm not sure that the nation-states are going to get to make most of the decisions on this stuff right I mean it's the corporations that do the actual trading that will decide what system they're going to use right I mean you know no country you know take the US government right the US government employs about one person in a hundred in America and they control maybe five or ten percent of the budget totally so if the entire nation decides they're gonna do things one way the government Falls rather than leads similarly with the Fortune 1000 if they decide that they're gonna use the following mechanisms for trade pretty much everybody gets dragged along all of these things have games of influence you know it's a half a percent on tariffs there and it's a slightly better deal on taxation you know for your special economic zone there and you know just kind of tips it a little one way or the other and then time and replication is people copy these models kind of gives you the historical track that you wind up in okay thanks my very much fini appreciated the big picture leaving [Applause]

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End of [732] Vinay Gupta - How Blockchain will change our global system in the next 10 years | BIC18. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [41](https://guptaoption.com/texts/41.md) 21 Jun 18 Space – Internet of Agreements (2018); the most closely related, [678](https://guptaoption.com/texts/678.md) WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with Vinay Gupta (2022); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.