# Start Talks Vinay Gupta > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [766]. 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, 2016-05-10 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1m1q_I_w0c. 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): Links ledger and humanitarian strands. - Career works it belongs to: - 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) - 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) - 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) - Topics: blockchain / speed / light (40%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (20%); blockchain / global / internet (20%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: legacy IT (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); IKEA shelter (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); humanitarian innovation (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); global democracy (1 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); peer-to-peer (1 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); Burning Man (1 here; 90 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); supply chain (1 here; 92 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated) - The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): legacy IT - Importance: core-text score 0.34 (1.00 is the top), number 206 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [791] [COP26 Event: Green Blockchain, Green Economy (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/791.md): close in content (cosine 0.95) - [678] [WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with Vinay Gupta (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/678.md): close in content (cosine 0.95) - On the same works, just before: [684] [DEVCON1: Dangerous Old Men: Cypherpunk's Failure,... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/684.md); [688] [Vinay Gupta on the beginning of blockchain (360,... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/688.md); [291] Interview with Sam Warburton of RWE about blockchains,... (2016) - On the same works, just after: [378] [Vinay Gupta Live Stream (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/378.md); [280] [Vinay Gupta Digital 2016 Newport Wales (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/280.md); [282] [Wales 1 (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/282.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: Start Talks Vinay Gupta, video, 2016-05-10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1m1q_I_w0c; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [766], https://guptaoption.com/texts/766.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1m1q_I_w0c&t=0s) so um could ibody erise our hand if they've heard of the blockchain hey does that keep your hand up if you feel like you could stand up here and explain it okay good one or two one or two I almost feel like it should be you up here Paul so um I'm going to do two things firstly I'm going to reveal my secret identity then I'm going to talk about why the blockchain might be what it takes to unbreak the humanitarian disaster right so my secret identity is I've been in the humanitarian Innovation game 15 years with a shelter project called the hexayurt which is the ancestor of both the Ikea shelter and the wiki house it is the original open- Source building they build about a million dollars worth of these things a year at Burning Man it is the dominant shelter for hard weather camping in America uh it looks like this walls are a whole 4 by8 sheet roof pieces are a half sheet cut in half you can Mass produce these things in near infinite quantity anywhere in the world from the in end of the industrial supply chain with nothing more expensive than a table saw on a screw gun does this sound like it could have been a really interesting Innovation for the humanitarian sector yeah right you think 15 years later nothing but a sea of closed doors because it lasts too long you put them in into what's meant to be a temporary disaster it Bridges the gap between development Aid and Disaster Response the political consequences of putting people in permanent buildings when you are meant to be there getting in and out again in six months when the TV cameras move are completely unacceptable inside of the space and as a result something which costs less to deploy than tents is up on blocks being widely ignored by the entire sector it doesn't fit the business model this is where the blockchain is it is by far the best way of building an open society that you're ever going to see it produces a better democracy than democracy it produces better money than money it allows people to convene in a truly Democratic fashion to write the rules of their own Society locally nationally globally inside of consortia or anything else it uses software to let people write their own law the first thing anybody did with [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1m1q_I_w0c&t=150s) this was an anonymous group still Anonymous uh built a thing called Bitcoin Bitcoin was essentially the uh the Central Bank of the internet it was a currency directly convened by peers which had International fundability and which to this day is the first example of a citizen driven attempt to reform international finance so this is an extraordinarily powerful set of Technology when the first thing you do is create a Central Bank of the internet what do you think Act 2 is going to be like my money is on global democracy but we're dealing with an instrument which has the power to produce change at this level and as a result there's a lot of fear and confusion but especially fear so the blockchain is a simple thing over here in the 1970s in the darkness uh we have the prehistory where the database was developed and at this point in history a database was a room of machines that had 1in wide magnetic tape in them and that room of machines was so fragile that if you got stray hair in it it would wreck the entire thing it could physically destroy your data in one of the uh magnetic tape drives so people would wear white suits in these things specifically so you didn't contaminate the machines and this is where the silo mindset around your organizational data is born the original Silo is the database it's super fragile if something goes wrong there's no fixing it and this is where that whole feeling that your it infrastructure is incredibly fragile if something goes wrong you're never going to fix it lives that's how it was in the 70s if it looks that way today your organization is out of date you come across the 1990s this is the kind of PC era at this point the it infrastructure is appliances and it's one per desk than back in the 7s where it was one computer per organization and the one per desk era is dominated by computer networking because one computer per desk means that to build an Institutional picture of reality you need to have these machines networked and the network era expands for the next 20 years predominantly as the web but then as mobile phones and now internet of things and a few other Technologies so the network is penetrating into everything you know pretty soon it'll be in our smart glasses see want better now and as a [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1m1q_I_w0c&t=300s) result you know we've got this total awareness of what's happening in the world all times from this we then filter and filter and filter and filter until we have an operational picture that shows us what we want to know about reality rather than being swamped by the enormous sea of incoming data and this is quite important because the picture of the world that we want to see is the picture that allows us to take action and most of the time what we want to take action about is rooted right in our personal lives it's a very close-up world so we come across to 2010 we get the third major wave of innovation which is blockchains and the blockchain simply takes the database and the network and merges them into a single system so that everywhere that you have data you have Network and everywhere that you have Network you have data there is no connecting to the database there is simply the database and to make a database which everybody can access simultaneously at the same time time you have to give up the idea of editing because if 58 people are editing the same piece of of data who is to say what the actual situation is it's a very very difficult thing so instead of editing we simply have publishing and it's publishing of facts which are immutable once it is spoken it cannot be unspoken every single statement is signed by the author of the statement and in Bitcoin this was a method of sending essentially checks I send Bob five Bitcoin from my current balance of 20 Bitcoin put it into the network the network checks I have 20 Bitcoin everybody on the network get a copy of the check Bob who is looking at his Network sees that he has indeed been given the check and the check is the payment because everybody can see the check everybody knows what the payment is so if you think of this as being kind of a database which is distributed through all the machines and it takes statements of fact from individuals locks them into an immutable register and when you you want to know what's going on you check the register You Now understand the blockchain well enough to reason about it without making big mistakes not that complicated the work that was done to make it work is just as complicated as all the stuff that happens inside of your Wi-Fi chips all the stuff that happens inside of your big Oracle databases there's an astonishingly complex stack of stuff underneath it the web was just this technically complicated in its day do not worry about not understanding the technology you don't understand your [7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1m1q_I_w0c&t=450s) mobile phone you don't care right there's been an enormous fetish for explaining Bitcoin exp you don't need to know you need to know what it does right so why is this a big deal for the humanitarian Center the reason this matters is this on the Bitcoin Network there is no center of the universe there is nobody who is in charge on the ethereum network there is no center of the universe there is nobody who is in charge the software is genuinely peer-to-peer what that means is that you don't get the problem of asking whose technology we're using we're just using the technology everybody who has a copy of the software and is running the software is a fool Pier now as we all know and I don't think anybody would disagree all of the worst problems in the humanitarian space are bureaucratic right it's not that hard to put up tents or hexayurts or filter water or do any of these things right it's not that difficult the problems are entirely bureaucratic and the first question that we have in any kind of Crisis is Who's on First and who's getting the credit right so figuring out who's on first is the question of seniority in the disaster everybody brought their own funding so nobody gets to tell them what to do and the result is the UN cluster system it used to have a slightly longer name the UN cluster system doesn't really work because there is no it infrastructure which adequately supports genuine pure collaboration in environment without hierarchy so if you were to slide some it infrastructure under the cluster system that genuinely allowed these institutions to be seen as full peers on a network where they could share their actions and plans and everybody could see what everybody else is doing it might provide a huge jump in Effectiveness a genuine Quantum weap in effectiveness of the cluster system which it could badly use the other place where it comes in is who gets the credit if every single action which is taken the well is dug the um you know the the food is distributed if every action which is taken has pictures which are taken and logged on a blockchain and you could track back the spending through this permanent record to say these small donations were gathered up through these vehicles they were put into this set of Banks and then they were transferred over here and it went down there and this is where it was given out you could see where every single dollar spent [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1m1q_I_w0c&t=600s) actually went and the people that did good work could claim the credit and there are lots of projects like this my company consensus is working on one uh which is called boardroom and Paul's partner with that Mark charmer of AKO right up here he's working on a project called giving OS building on top of the aqua Legacy it's just not that hard to envisage how this stuff could produce a massive change uh and I hope you'll have lots of fun learning about it and talking to us about it in the next few days thank you [Applause] --- End of [766] Start Talks 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, [378](https://guptaoption.com/texts/378.md) Vinay Gupta Live Stream (2016); the most closely related, [791](https://guptaoption.com/texts/791.md) COP26 Event: Green Blockchain, Green Economy (2021); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.