# Vinay Gupta, Robin Hood Coop London Open Office, August 2015

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [759]. 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, 2015-11-16 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWXi5KFc7fk. Text: automatic captions, partly 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): Equity across supply chains.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out of ideas (2010): One-page paper: the richest fifth are eating the planet, so the next economy has to be at peace with other... (suggested by machine)
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine)
  - 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)
- Topics: Rural poverty & development infrastructure (60%); value / equity / infrastructure (20%); Ethereum — launch, release process & programmable blockchains (20%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Occupy (3 here; 20 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); supply chains (5 here; 59 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); peer-to-peer (1 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); refugee camp (1 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Hexayurt Project (1 here; 70 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 4 undated); supply chain (1 here; 92 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); smart contracts (1 here; 110 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); contracts (1 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.27 (1.00 is the top), number 289 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [706] [Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin - with Vinay Gupta | Virtual... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/706.md): close in content (cosine 0.93)
  - [752] [Vinay Gupta: The Cities That Will Walk Away (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/752.md): close in content (cosine 0.92)
- On the same works, just before: [171] [Taming Black Elephants (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/171.md); [755] [Vinay Gupta | Computers that just work | State of the... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/755.md); [229] [The Man Whose Job It Is to Constantly Imagine the Total... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/229.md)
- On the same works, just after: [769] [Vinay Gupta talk, Amsterdam 21/10/2015 (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/769.md); [694] [EB114 – Vinay Gupta: From Lawyer Capitalism To... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/694.md); [776] [Vinay Gupta presents "Nuclear Poker" to the London... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/776.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, Robin Hood Coop London Open Office, August 2015, video, 2015-11-16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWXi5KFc7fk; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [759], https://guptaoption.com/texts/759.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWXi5KFc7fk&t=0s) So uh I'm Vinay Gupta of the Hexayurt Project and of Ethereum. Uh and I'm here today because well Ethereum is a smart contract contracting platform. Uh Robin Hood are doing a lot of work that will probably need smart contracts and they invited me here as a guest because I'm notoriously tough on um the governance and political representation issues about new technology. So, I'm here to basically talk about the long-term consequences and prevent the little mistakes now that will prevent uh cause the entire thing to screw up later. Cool. So, now do you want to read that? Sure. Okay. Let us imagine what to do when we actually wait. Let us imagine what do we actually want our world to become. Not as it presently is and is becoming with uh finance and blockchains. Not as financial technologies are presently used, but how we wish them to be used. Let's imagine that the year is now 2020. Capital has difftoer relation. That there are no banks, at least not as they exist now, and that the finance has increasingly become free as if its current misuse has ended. That it's become free to create new kinds of social relations. What would this look like? What should it look like? What if you and I commanded the forces of finance? What would it mean? Well, now,

[1:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWXi5KFc7fk&t=90s) so every time I come onto this kind of terrain, the first thing I have to remind people is that we are colonial victors. Pretty much everybody involved in these debates is somebody whose families five, 10 generations back were involved in raping and pillaging the entire world and dragging all of that money back to Europe and America. So what we don't understand is that a fair world is a world in which all the poor people that we defrauded and pillaged and stole from at gunpoint banditry for the previous, you know, 500 years get all of their stuff back. You know, if you want to talk about what a fair financial relationship looks like, it starts with global reparations for colonialism. And I think the notion that you have to basically factor in the real geopolitical situation with which finance is embedded before you start unpicking it is a really hard cell. It's the same problem with Occupy. You know, Occupy were interested in sharing the wealth of the 1%, but they weren't interested in sharing their wealth with the bottom billion. Everybody in Occupy thought that if the world was fair, they would wind up richer. The truth is, if the world is fair, they would wind up poorer. So for me, when you start

[2:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWXi5KFc7fk&t=160s) talking about, you know, a peer-to-peer relationship in finance, what we start talking about is the people working on the Macintoshes and the people buying the Macintoshes should have about the same standard of living. That the people on both ends of the supply chains should be doing about equally well. And right now we have supply chains which basically concentrate value in the rich countries. And what we want is distributive supply chains. Distributive supply chains where the wealth is approximately equal along the supply chain. So ISO lines of wealth along supply chains. And this is not to say that everybody in the world should have the same standard of living. But ideally buyers and sellers would roughly equalize their wealth on each transaction because that's what a fair deal would look like. And instead we keep using political power and military force to ensure that there are no fair deals. So to me the first thing is that we start having every transaction tend to equalize the wealth of the people involved in the transaction rather than wealth concentration. Um and this

[3:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWXi5KFc7fk&t=220s) question about what should it look like? It'd be great if we could factor in carbon dioxide emissions and vaccinations and the basic you know health and social justice kind of stuff alongside of environmental sustainability into the finance framework. The problem is that if we do that, it becomes really clear who the winners and losers are in the current global game. And that will be enormously painful to everybody involved that is in a wealthy country. You know, we're still haunted by the inability to design fair systems because colonial guilt pervades everything we do. people persuade themselves that the American police uh you know opening fire on black people more or less as if their lives were irrelevant is some kind of aberration. But it's actually just foreign policy. It's America's global foreign policy reflected at hope. And you have to kind of see these things systemically because finance is a global system. And if you want to imagine a fairer version of a global system, you have to go all the way through the current version of that global system identifying what's unfair. And the truth is everything we do is unfair. That's why the Macintosh users are always portrayed as being happy rich Americans and the people that build them have nets outside of their windows so they don't jump. Um,

[4:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWXi5KFc7fk&t=295s) so, um, if you and I commanded the forces of global finance, if we ran that show, um, I think we'd have to take on the awesome responsibility of the starving people. You know, we've got a billion people hungry. We've got all manner of people that are unvaccinated. We're not investing the money in curing the right diseases. All of these kind of factors. If we had control of the assets, these problems would be our problems. You look at Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Elon Musk. They're people that took enormous reserves of financial power and instead of using that money to just make more money, they used that war money to solve the world's problems and in the process made some money as well. But the fact that they were willing to make this enormous push to change the way that the world worked and put their money where their mouth was on that, you know, Gates donated something like was it 50 or 80 billion and Buffett about the same. um you know those enormous uh givebacks represent people that are actually taking control of global finance not in this kind of bottom up sense but in the sense of they just won the existing game and then changed what they did with the money. So maybe it would look like a world where many more individuals were on the Gates and Buffett path and we all gave some of the access that we have to the people that need it far more than we do. You know, if you spend5 pounds a day unnecessarily, that's enough to support maybe two or three families in a refugee camp. Um, we could make the world work, but we'd have to look at everything in a clear light. I'm not sure we would like it, but maybe it would change what we do. Cool. Always interesting.

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End of [759] Vinay Gupta, Robin Hood Coop London Open Office, August 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, [769](https://guptaoption.com/texts/769.md) Vinay Gupta talk, Amsterdam 21/10/2015 (2015); the most closely related, [706](https://guptaoption.com/texts/706.md) Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin - with Vinay Gupta | Virtual... (2018); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.