# Vinay Gupta | Interview | State of the Net 2015 > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [757]. 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, 2015-10-10 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ3q66hyrpY. Text: automatic captions, mostly corrected - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015), before the law step (Mattereum, 2017). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Explainer. - Career works it belongs to: - Programmable Blockchains in Context (2015): The launch explainer for Ethereum: where programmable blockchains sit in the line from databases to the web. - The Future We Deserve: "Facebook for the Five Billion?" (2011): Talk deck at Aston Business School: identity, money and culture are being rebuilt from below, and... (suggested by machine) - Taking a crack at a practical system (introducing the ESCROWNYM) (2012): Blog essay proposing the escrownym: an identity lodged with escrow brokers under a legally binding... (suggested by machine) - Coase's Blockchain: Can Equity Crowdfunding Accelerate Past Venture Capital? (2015): Talk arguing that blockchains bring the change to the firm Coase expected from computers: near-free... (suggested by machine) - A Blockchain Solution For Identity? (2017): Keynote to the Dutch Blockchain Coalition (BC3) at Techruption: insurance as the way to make different... (suggested by machine) - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. - 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) - 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: Coase — transaction costs and capital formation (50%) - Importance: core-text score 0.33 (1.00 is the top), number 214 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [164] [Programmable blockchains in context: Ethereum’s Future –... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/164.md): same career work: Programmable Blockchains in Context - [379] [Blockchains, databases, reification: are bottom up... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/379.md): same career work: Programmable Blockchains in Context - On the same works, just before: [296] [Vinay Gupta - Transparent Society - Crowdfunding on... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/296.md); [295] [Singapore talk (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/295.md); [225] [Imogen Heap: saviour of the music industry? | Imogen... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/225.md) - On the same works, just after: [164] [Programmable blockchains in context: Ethereum’s Future –... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/164.md); [695] [Vinay Gupta - Dangerous Old Men: cypherpunk's failure,... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/695.md); [242] [Dog Atheism: on smart contracts, risk, and value networks (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/242.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 | Interview | State of the Net 2015, video, 2015-10-10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ3q66hyrpY; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [757], https://guptaoption.com/texts/757.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ3q66hyrpY&t=0s) Vinay Gupta uh what is a blockchain? What do we need to know? So blockchains are basically a new form of database but they're a database that solves all the problems left over from the failure of databases and networks in the past to work together. Uh basically in the 1970s we have about 20 years of expansion of the database as a concept and before that big organizations were all on paper which is unimaginable now. 1990s we really get networks up and running. You get the internet, you get the web, you get Amazon and all of this stuff, you know, there's this huge blooming forward. And now that revolution is more or less stable, but we still don't have a world in which blockchains and databases work together properly, which is why you have to enter your name and address 7,000 times over the course of an average year, and why you can't get big entities to work together on your behalf. your electricity company can't talk to your bank, can't talk to your government, can't talk to your credit card company, and as a result, you wind up constantly having to broker information and ship it around by hand. And blockchains potentially get rid of that. You said you need more transparency. What do you mean with that? Well, so the way that blockchains work is that everybody can see everything that happened and everybody agrees on everything that happened. This is why Bitcoin works. It's basically just a gigantic spreadsheet, but you can only write into it in a way that everybody sees. And if you write in a transaction that, you know, overextends your bank account, the system just rejects it. And this really works, right? You've got billions of dollars of value inside of Bitcoin. So that kind of transparency can apply to software as well. You put the software in the blockchain and it becomes what they call a smart contract like you have in Ethereum. Everybody can pull the software out of the blockchain and inspect it. And then when you push some value into the software, you put some data into the software, everybody knows exactly what will happen because the software is exactly there to see. And I keep thinking about things like uh social security claims. Imagine if the software used to run the claims process was embedded in a blockchain so you could see it. So you take all the data that's stated as fact, you put it in a blockchain. You take all the software that processes these facts, you put it in a blockchain, and you could wind up with a completely transparent social security system. The price is that lots of your personal data is leaked into the world, but the benefit is that you know exactly what's happening. And I think that we could have a system where you uh provide people with an anonymous identity. So the information is in a blockchain, but you can't tell what human being it refers to. And then apart from not knowing which account goes with which person, we could have a [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ3q66hyrpY&t=150s) transparent welfare --- End of [757] Vinay Gupta | Interview | State of the Net 2015. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [164](https://guptaoption.com/texts/164.md) Programmable blockchains in context: Ethereum’s Future –... (2015); the most closely related, [164](https://guptaoption.com/texts/164.md) Programmable blockchains in context: Ethereum’s Future –... (2015); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.