# CCForum and Malta AI & Blockchain Summit Malta 2019/Vinay Gupta

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [748]. 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, 2019-05-24 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HHm-F3DoEg. Text: automatic captions, mostly 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): Green capitalism through accounting.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (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:
  - 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)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (50%); Capitalism, consumption & resources (25%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: digital identity for things (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); digital identity (2 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Ethereum team (1 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); refugee shelter (1 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); William Shatner (1 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2019, 1 undated); Shatner (1 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); human rights (1 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); supply chains (1 here; 59 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); Burning Man (1 here; 90 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.25 (1.00 is the top), number 314 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 0.93)
  - [735] [Vinay Gupta - Mattereum (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/735.md): close in content (cosine 0.93)
- On the same works, just before: [931] [Blockchain and the Future of Humanity | Malta AIBC... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/931.md); [257] [Vinay Gupta - Oslo Blockchain Day - Merging the Physical... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/257.md); [747] [Startup Societies Podcast - Episode 34 - Vinay Gupta (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/747.md)
- On the same works, just after: [750] [CCForum and Malta AI & Blockchain Summit / press... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/750.md); [255] [Global Fintech and Blockchain - Imperial College - Vinay... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/255.md); [862] [Interview VINAY GUPTA about Ethereum, Decarbonizing by... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/862.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: CCForum and Malta AI & Blockchain Summit Malta 2019/Vinay Gupta, video, 2019-05-24, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HHm-F3DoEg; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [748], https://guptaoption.com/texts/748.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HHm-F3DoEg&t=0s) [Music] so we'll start with a simple question which is this is everybody happy with the way the world runs anything that you feel really comfortable with how all this is that's not really doing so I want to set the table stakes here which it is the books it's probably one of the most innovative forces in the world and it would be nice if we could demonstrate directly a method for the blockchain to help transform the world into a place that we're all proud to live in rather than being kind of embarrassed in a bit sound if not extremely angry so I want to start with the table stakes right the world is warming very rapidly we've got enormous economic problems which resulted in a know-it-all fall I think being very poor London has recently been paralyzed by a group called extinction or valiant who are really taking to the streets to beat some noise about this and they've been very successful negotiated with government got a resolution passed the clearly UK was in climate emergency they're activists are doing things actual world-changing work I would say the mulching community is whilst Rock of a lot of its political vision because of the intractable problems of libertarianism at scale governance is proven to be very difficult the government's have given us a very hard time as we'd have to figure out how to work with them to make the world into a better place at large because we went in to not negotiation some kind of naive beliefs which have been instructed by regulators we sort of lost our way right we have an enormous amount of various stonger very exciting commercial work just to solve business problems but the kind of global vision we just started with has gotten substantially diluted I think that's because it was the wrong picture it wasn't the vision that offered a realistic chance of success I think we need a different vision for the future of the blockchain so I'm gonna propose a very very simple narrative about how we should think about the future of the blockchain right what is it that we are all working towards collectively and this is way bigger than my country right I don't Amy a little part of this story this is a story but literally the future of the pulp chain how algorithm is particularly am I could work with the blockchain to create global systemic change but I want to be very clear this is a political vision this is a story about how we should approach these problems and the highest systemic and meta systemic level and the first thing is it's very hard to change the system

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HHm-F3DoEg&t=150s) that your romantic right the injustice of the world is it's in your bank account it's in your vote and it's in your governments but it's in the fact that most of your phones were made with flavor in countries in which people don't have the right to things like unions most of the minerals that we extract to run industrial civilization these come from bond places the blockchain gives us the theoretical possibility of knowing but the practical experience because is that we're participating in the evils of the world and we feel powerless to change anything but I want to suggest that we have the possibility of change I'm gonna tell you how so the simplest thing is this right it is a digital age we went through we do all of the worlds of knowledge and a fair part of its wisdom and we cook stuff online and we gave every single piece of information at URL so all the information in the world heart means what I do for a living is build names for material objects this is the first thing we've done it for it is a figure of Captain Kirk and consulate on earth owned by William Shatner the a triplicate currently in Star Trek and we're working with mr. shocker on an anti-counterfeiting projects for holt that's a very lightweight example of just giving things a name and attention province refers to it and lots of people in the blockchain space are doing this but what I want to suggest is that we need a much broader vision beyond legal rights for physical assets we need a model in which every asset in the world has a unique identifier but every human being in the world has meaning identifier we already have this vision the self silver digital identity we need something that's a digital identity for things that we need this for two reasons the first is it makes it possible to attach legal responsibility to things like the Carver if you have a car and every time you fill the car with costly your car picks up a whole bunch of pot harcum tokens and then if you pay a bunch of money to offset those tokens against the environmental and carbon offsets or carbon mediation pookins you can imagine a global economy in which people were genuinely able to see the consequences of their actions right if you look at your wallet or you lose and you can see the bar tokens pouring in as you perform actions that are offset and this is entirely possible I

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HHm-F3DoEg&t=300s) mean if you think of bitcoins you could calculate the average co2 consumption of the Bitcoin port in advance how much carbon you've created by the money with bitcoin transactions you've done these things are all calculable but not just inside the crypto ecosystem in manufacturing industry all those folks are working with blockchains for supply chains all the people that are digging in hard to all of those kinds of issues there is a strong possibility right the way across the entire space that the blockchain will become the world's global carbon management system not as a single individual enterprise not as a single point of failure company but as a global carbon management protocol which many many different technologies and many many different companies could connect to and that's a realistic technical possibility it's probably no harder given the tools that we have matter the making email interoperate was in the 1980s and 1990s or making the web work properly on mobile devices was 10 years ago we really have the possibility of building a global carbon management protocol right across all of these technologies the second thing that comes out of this is that once every object in the world has an identity that can be used for the carbon or slavery free trade or implementation of things like detecting allergens right what is the food were new every time they accidentally buy something you'll alert to if you just say they're not going to eat peanuts because they're bad for you we don't have technological support for that the wheels of technological support for things like groups from countries that have human rights records you don't like you set their morality in the software and the software days away from decisions at Radford we call this automated or auntie we need support for software to help us make decisions that are truly aligned with our values and if we do succeed in building a world in which physical objects have four computer identities digital identities the other thing is that we can do large-scale optimization so the average electric thrill that's used for something like a within minutes inside that's harder life but there's no city in the world where I could have something delivered me an electric drill use it for couple of hours and then send it back again and pay five or ten dollars right we can't rent the things that we mean because we don't have the right protocols for handling matter and the result is an enormous amount of corporate consumption everybody has clothes in the wardrobe which if you could have certainly friends and they all was arrived at long time and they were always the right size and you can

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HHm-F3DoEg&t=450s) see exactly how you would look in an application before include the one everybody would have much more access to clothing but we do flesh tough clutter in our lives all the things that you seldom use us have all the rented I mean that environmental impact of doing that it might save us ten twenty thirty percent of global consumption for small countries it's an enormous step so I started out on this trajectory in nineteen eight so 2002 when they went for being attacked to being an energy policy ocean is often made a livin I desperately wanted to do something about the state of the world I spent basically 14 years working and trying to get a refugee shelter that I designed into mass production as some of the spin-offs from a project have done very well there's a shelter called the shifter hold there Sam Kiev shelter but what took me into the blockchain space was the understanding that the systemic problems in the world aren't going to be sold just by cheap housing right and you haven't achieved housing we figured out the cheap housing problem the designs are online they build five or ten thousand units here for Burning Man every year that are a bunch of companies selling these things no copyright open all open source all of those systems weren't enough to produce the kind of systemic change that I wanted and that was why he joined the Ethereum team in the chronological sisters for a theory although the end product of change has to be reflected in the material world it's all the levels above the material world and finance and governance and accountability and transparency that we need to transform to get the change in the material world that we want which is a low carbon green economy which has adequate resources for all human beings and still has the ability to build spaceships and we can get there with gold material resources we just need better ways of organizing them and the blockchain is in that step and not even if it starts out with stories and visions so

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End of [748] CCForum and Malta AI & Blockchain Summit Malta 2019/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, [750](https://guptaoption.com/texts/750.md) CCForum and Malta AI & Blockchain Summit / press... (2019); 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.