# Vinay Gupta + Regulation & Innovation panel @ #PillarUnconference Day 3 LIVE | Pillar (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [767], part 1 of 2. 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, 2018-07-18 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ. 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): Legal-layer thinking behind Mattereum.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - 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)
  - 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)
- 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)
  - 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: Smart contracts, law & arbitration (31%); Smart contracts, arbitration & dispute resolution — the legal layer (14%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (11%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: land registry (3 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); case law (2 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Ian Grigg (3 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); identity standard (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); legal layer (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); Legalese (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); Wired (2 here; 22 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); political change (2 here; 25 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); certificates (2 here; 26 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); real assets (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2012)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): land registry; legal layer
- Importance: core-text score 0.27 (1.00 is the top), number 290 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)
  - [565] [Coin Telegraph AMA with Mattereum's Vinay Gupta 14th... (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/565.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
- On the same works, just before: [614] Dean Masley & Ahsan Fazal - Internet of Agreements - Space (2018); [615] Anushka Sharma - Internet of Agreements - Space (2018); [617] Benoit Chamot - Internet of Agreements - Space (2018)
- On the same works, just after: [607] Pavlo Tanasyuk - Internet of Agreements - Space (2018); [608] Kryha - Internet of Agreements - Space (2018); [609] James Bruegger - Internet of Agreements - Space (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 + Regulation & Innovation panel @ #PillarUnconference Day 3 LIVE | Pillar, video, 2018-07-18, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [767], https://guptaoption.com/texts/767.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ&t=0s) here had the opportunity to see the nay speak last night alright so you know you're in for a treat Bonet needs no introduction he was part of the launch team of Ethereum he's been working on a lot of incredible tech and humanitarian projects so without further ado Vinay Gupta on laws without lawyers thanks so much for being with us all right so this is going to be basically a sort of notes from learning about law I started I really not knowing anything about war at all certainly no more than anybody else knew and because you know I was a programmer right and programmers are a pretty impressionistic model of what the law is how the law works we're not really used to the law being directly relevant to our interests and I start to get interested in the wall because of Ian Grigg who was one of the great early actors and crypto all the way through the 1990s he was kind of my generation Satoshi an Ian Grigg basically had figured out that you could use arbitration to handle real assets using crypto technology and Ian figured this out very very very early on so when I was the Ethereum foundation the question came up well you know if we're gonna handle assets using the blockchain we're going to need to go and build a kind of Ricardian Court in the model the Ian Grigg had outlined in the 1990s and had done litigation on so I contacted the n1 was like hey we're gonna do this and Ian said sure and then I started asking around the city of London to find some lawyers that would be interested in helping I found London arbitration club I remember this is still 90s or 2015 we're talking about and so we started the process of trying to get together a team to build a Ricardian court that would be capable of dealing with warrant contracts in the context of the city of London and this process is very very nebulous it's just a conversation at that point it doesn't turn into a company until much much later so what I was hoping to achieve with that was to make it possible without a whole bunch of additional stress and effort to be able to manipulate goods and services on the blockchain and have those changes in state registered in the real world as actual transactions essentially to be able to buy and sell things on chain in

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ&t=150s) a way that would be recognized by a court you want to do something that looks like an air B&B you need to have your opinion respected right when you use the blockchain to do the transaction look I've write to be here I rented it on the blockchain that has to legally mean something or you can't build services you need the legal layer to get access to the real world and I didn't really think I was going to be heavily personally involved in doing that I thought that was going to be something where the City of London law firms would be like oh did you say money and that they'd get pulled into it from there as it happens it turns out that it's quite hard to get other people to do things like that because it's obvious to you that this is a great opportunity it's not obvious to them and at a certain point you get into a position where it's kind of like well if it's such a good idea why don't you do it and by then I had enough friends in the legal fraternity that we had a kind of credible looking team if we wanted to do it and so but bit more than a year ago were like okay we're gonna do this thing and this is what became material which is my current company now along the way what has happened is that I have slowly become corrupted by the lawyers right I've slowly begun to see you know a lot of how the lawyers perceive the world and that's really what I wanted to

[3:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ&t=229s) talk about today I wanted to talk about how I've you know come to understand legal philosophy a very sore workman like level not a sophisticated level just so that there's kind of a primer for nerds that are interested in how the law works to understand it kind of in the language of the Nerds so I'm gonna do a little bit of that and then I'm gonna talk about about the implications so the first thing is that we have systems which are very similar to the way that law works as a human practice and those systems are large-scale open source software and content projects so Linux foundation or Wikipedia are actually much closer analogues to the legal system works than really anything else that you're gonna stumble across and this is because there are sort of very long scale projects they've been going for several decades in the case of Linux and those kind of systems are built on top of much older engineering culture and engineering practices they've got an age to them and they've also got a sort of monstrous size an age and monstrous size and the most powerful parts of the interface with the legal system and you begin to understand that because no single human can comprehend the entire system there are no final authorities there are only final processes you know you begin to see the structure of the thing is like you know rats in an enormous maze and you only know the route between you and the cheese but you have no idea of the overall shape of the maze and most of the time in our lives we don't interact with systems that are clearly verifiably vastly too large for human being to ever make any real comprehensive impact or a model of you see this a little bit if you work in biology you see this a little bit if you work in something big and complicated like building spaceships but for the most part we work at human scale in human scale systems you know if you're running a coffee shop or you're writing this program with 15 co-workers the systems that you're interacting with are sort of manageable human scale the law is not like that US tax code alone is something like a hundred thousand pages of dense argument so you don't have specialists in the tax code you're specialists in this 45 page section of the tax code right so the first thing is it's an enormous enterprise and in that respect it's a bit like you know Linux right or Wikipedia if you think of Linux nobody understands the entire Linux kernel nobody understands the entire Linux operating system there are hundreds of

[6:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ&t=379s) overlapping specialty specialists that kind of together understand the system as a whole but individually they don't understand the entire system so the first thing that I learned about law is that law is completely vast the second thing is that it's incredibly old so the lawyers are perfectly comfortable with the idea that they're part of a human enterprise that goes back deep into prehistory you know they're like well it's probably older than farm and you know it's probably not that much younger than language so you know they're sort of thinking like law and Fire probably roughly the same age and they're very they're very comfortable with that as a model right you know it's like well you've always had disputes between human beings and you've always had third parties involved in the disputes and you've always had precedents if you only because it's you know well you're my older brother do it why can't I do it well that's the establishment of legal precedent and so they're very comfortable with this idea that law is an integral part of human life and always has been and that they're therefore indispensable and this is a very strong part of the legal world model it's this sort of like well but how else could you possibly expect to do it that's how it's always been done you know we were as old as wag which we're completely integral to the whole human society why everything would fall apart if we weren't here to smooth out all these difficult parts so that's the sort of ancient enterprise that they sees themselves as being part of right the legal fraternity thinks of itself as being bigger older weirder and more important than say religion as an enterprise you know religion yes we've had those for a while but we've had a whole much longer and it's much bigger and much more complicated much more important I mean because it's the real world and what you begin to realize after a while is that they're actually more or less right although that sounds like I came to self aggrandizing models law what you begin to realise is that it's actually the infrastructure of society in a very primal way you know it's like stuff is the way stuff is because the lawyers and the wall making machinery agreed it to be that way and if you pull those things out it's not clear that what you're left with is in any way shape or form like society and we tend to reinvent them as soon as we turn around so does everybody know the term barrack room lawyer right so these are soldiers who get very very very good at the rules and regulations of the military and as a result of disproportionate influence and power because they're constantly able to use the military regulations to get what they want the situation that they're in and that's an example the reinvention of a lawyer

[8:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ&t=529s) in a situation where you've got a set of rules and some human being learns the rules so this is sort of the next thing that I learned is that lawyers are human beings that understand the rules of systems and then start figuring out how to extract advantage from those rules does that remind us of any other demographic learning the rules of the system and they're trying to figure out how to get advantage from the rules sounds like pretty much anybody that plays games for learn professionally so it's chess players go players poker players but it's also hackers so i fairly convinced that if you go back a couple hundred years a lot of the people that we think of as being you know kind of hackers software natives actually wouldn't have been engineers working on railroads they would have been lawyers because it's the same property of having these enormous bodies of text from which you extract meaning and pattern and purpose and then you use that text to extract advantage and if you're a lawyer who happens to be you to creating new tax you're it's reading and interpreting you're building new stuff you wind up wanting to become a lawmaker or a judge and I'll talk a little bit about lawmakers and judges in a second so an enormous enterprise of human rulemaking of understanding human rulemaking that of synthesizing benefit from those rules akin in scope to the largest of our software projects um probably much larger certainly much older certainly much stranger this is the bedrock system that we're interacting with now let's

[10:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ&t=621s) talk a little bit about how law is made and then how one is used voilá is made by basically politicians so to a very substantial degree and the purpose of politicians is to read the law understand the law and emit new law and new law theoretically is a text that you publish that then causes behavior change all the way through the country that you pass the law in so it's basically like writing a letter but now everybody has to do what the letter says or you threw them in jail it's quite a powerful thing to be able to write something down and then make everybody else in an entire country do it so we don't just let anybody go and do that that person has to be elected hopefully and then you want to put them inside of a system of checks and balances that prevent them using this power to say everyone must give me five pounds on Van mo right because you know if you had infinite power you might do that and then you think about things like income tax and it's like wait wait wait did they just write a letter to the world that says everybody has to give them the third of their income yeah that's exactly what they did right and it became law because we have a machinery that says that the things written down by lawmakers are laws this is a little strange isn't it like when you really started thinking about that like wait you literally just prepare a document and then a bunch of people say yes we agree that this will be the law and then it is the wall it's exactly how it works so the method that we select the makers of law by is currently called democracy that wasn't always how we made law it used to be that the king made law I am The King I think it should be absolutely illegal to wear shoes where one shoe is red and the other shoe is green make it so now it's the law because the King said so so we took this function of somebody speaking the law into existence and we took it from being a sovereign right that was attached to the king to being a sovereign right that's attached to something like a parliament in most places now that process is not trivial like that wasn't just you turned around one day and that was how you did it actually some fairly substantial things had to happen for that to become true and that was political change so a huge amount of the political change that happens in society is that you change the making of law you change the mechanism by which was made you don't change the fact that was made you don't change how was enforced but you change the machine that is necessary from

[12:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ&t=771s) making of war does that make sense so far I'm breaking this down into really small pieces because I hadn't really thought about this as being the management of a corpus of text but that's actually what the lawmaking process is it's very much like a DES in Wikipedia it's just you've got a set of special people that are allowed to make andit's and then once you've made the edits the edits become the wall and people beat you up if you don't do it it's kind of weird is that when you think about it from the angle so then let's talk about how the law is enforced right you have judges so judge is a person that understands the law theoretically better than anybody else in the courtroom hopefully but in civil war systems like the kind of Napoleonic systems the judges have one set of instructions and approach thing in one way I can't explain that properly because I don't understand it well enough to explain it in common law systems which is Britain America and a whole bunch of other places the judge is there to basically hear arguments from two sides so you come with a person that knows the law a lawyer and the lawyer says this situation is just like this other situation so you should give us the victory the other guy says no no the situation is not like this situation it's like that situation and there's you should give us the money so it's a process for be physically people make analogies to existing known good situations and then they attempt to map the current situation onto the situation which gives them an advantage and this is a little bit like mathematical reasoning right well we know from this branch of math that you know a squared plus B squared equals C squared and a right-angled triangle so this here is a right angle triangle it's just in three dimensions now two dimensions surely analogy will work and then you go through and you do the rigorous verification of the intuition because in mathematics you've got proof and was instead instead of proof you have the opinion of a judge and the judge says well I've looked at this situation I've heard the arguments from both sides and I think that is actually more like this or occasionally the judge will say you were both wrong this until I thought I'd make a decision once those decisions are made and this is where we begin to get back into blockchain territory they become established as legal precedent right legal precedent is the process by which every time a judge makes a decision like that a future judge can refer back to their decision and say well BOM said it was that way and I agree so we're gonna do it that way what they can't do in most jurisdictions is

[15:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ&t=921s) ignored the precedent so if a lawyer comes up and says judge bulb said it was like this and therefore this is the same case that becomes part of the analogical reasoning which is used to form new cases and that process of case law just forms layers and layers and layers of accretion until you wind up with the the law being hundreds of thousands or millions of pages of wall plus all of the necessary case law which is all the time than those walls have been interpreted by judges and decisions have been made it's a really big system at its practiced by very very very skilled human beings whose defining trait is their ability to comprehend large bodies of texts and then make reasoned arguments to other human beings about how those text should be interpreted which is of course why lawyers had so much in common at one point in history with priests is the corpus of text that you're interpreting the Bible or is the corpus of texture interpreting the law there were certain similarities and the attitudes that people took and very few people were literate now the the the process by which the English all got to be where it is is culturally specific right the Inns of Court which are basically the old big law firms are midway between Parliament and the City of London so it's halfway between the people that were making the law and the people that were doing the trade where people would meet and the legal fraternity started out as human photocopiers they were scribes he would copy the documents and eventually they started to notice that where there were mistakes and then they became the people that would sometimes help create the documents and then pretty soon you've got lawyers in the modern form so that's the sort of potted summary of how the law works as a machine the question then

[17:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ&t=1026s) is how does the blockchain fit into this story and I want to focus basically on three areas of that the first is how do you make a smart contract legally enforceable using this textual machine that we call the law the second is how could this blockchain technology fit into the existing legal system essentially to facilitate trade in the legal system and then the third question is what's the future of these two systems given that software and war are actually maintained and produce very similar kinds of people so if you want to make as far a contract into a legal contract the smart contract has to be a legal contract Brett sounds dumb but this is kind of obviously true so there are two ways that a smart contractor could become a legal contract the first is that somebody could pass a law that says the smart contract is a legal contract and then you basically except there's a smart contract is a contract in the same way that we accept that a digital signature is a signature and this is a perfectly reasonable way to do things I'm not saying it's the best way to do things are the only way to do things but it's a reasonable way to do things and a lot of jurisdictions are working on that approach the problem is that then the question is well what if I wrote the smart contract and some impossible to interpret computer language right I've given you a smart contract but I wrote in J or you know APL is it still a contract what can you interpret it and what you get is a whole bunch of legal decisions which get made in courts about whether a smart contract that was written in a particular way is a valid contract or is it a valid contract and there'll be a continuous ongoing definition of legal or illegal in that context the other approach that you can take is you can have an ordinary paper contract which gives you an incredibly detailed definition of what the smaller contract is going to do really tons of detail now in that situation there is much less doubt that the legal contract that the smart contract is a legal contract because the smaller contract is simply doing what the paper contract said the smart contract would do so that approach you could have very clear agreement between the two parties that they're going to do part of the contract will be implemented by software and then when you put those systems together you look at the legal text you look at the program we agree that the program is correctly described by the legal text so if we assent it to the paper contract we've assented to the smart contract and this approach is called the Ricardian contract and it's a very very

[19:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ&t=1176s) straightforward meat-and-potatoes way of making it possible to do things like buy and sell boots on a block train if you want to get access to the physical assets of the world the things which are control by governments and by contract for you're going to have to go through the court systems there's no other way around this you have to get the courts to agree that a smart contract is a contract or frankly the blockchain revolution is counseled and we can all go home right it's pretty straightforward because if you can't buy and sell property using a smart contract what is a smart contract for property is intellectual property it's music licenses its physical property its assets like stocks shares bonds all of these things are property and if you can't transfer that property in a way that a court will recognize using a blockchain you can't transfer the property at all you can move stuff around but stuff doesn't become property until court recognize it says it recognizes it as property if you're holding something like Bitcoin in say 2010 and somebody steals it from you there's practically no way that you can get a court to enforce your property rights because the court doesn't recognize that that was property and as a result you have real problems if that happened today you would have much less in the way of issues so the third sort of part with this right so the first part was how do we make smart contracts enforceable second part is how do you use these kind of technologies to manage the existing court systems and the simple answer is document management right the entire court system runs on evidence the evidence is sometimes mishandled or lost or displaced you want to be able to package all that stuff up in very neat strong convenient forms where you've got excellent evidence about what happened when it happened and there's a huge opportunity to use blockchain technology for evidence handling and document management in court systems and that's exactly the same arguments we make about doing it for things like shipping or banking or just about anything else you want to be able to manage the sort of processes of law using smaller contracts using block trades the third thing is the biggie the biggie is what happens when we begin to integrate law armed contract now I'm going to talk here

[21:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ&t=1318s) about a concept called smart statute I think this is originally an idea by a guy called mang Wong who runs a company called legalese it's possible he got from somewhere in academia but the basic concept of our statute is we take a chunk of the legal code that runs a country and we re implement it as software so suppose that we take something like your corporate tax of code and you take Joe some particularly nasty hundred and twenty pages out of the hundred thousand pages of tax code and we implement it as let's say an Excel spreadsheet right so you say write this excel spreadsheet is a faithful implementation of about 120 pages of law you come and you punch in 41 pieces of data on the front and it tells you how much tax to pay if the spreadsheet can't figure it out because you've hit some kind of weird edge case the spreadsheet will wake up and say go get a real lawyer so in that instance what you've got is semi-automated law it's automated but it's not quite fully law because that Excel spreadsheet hasn't been blasted by a government and therefore hasn't turned into real law but what if the law was published by the government in the form of an Excel spreadsheet this Excel spreadsheet is this section of the tax code you punch in your data in these boxes and what comes out is legally correct now that's not so different from the way that a lot of houses handle things like high frequency trading you have a contract between two people to do some high frequency trading you have a piece of software embedded in the contract which way is a piece of paper is stapled to it and everybody agrees the thing will be priced by that piece of software on a set of inputs it will run in real time so that sort of model is already well established in commerce if you brought it inside of government all kinds of things could you do well you could huge we simplify taxation you could simplify import and export you know here's an XML or adjacent specification to describe your goods describe your goods in this format submit it to the government's port system the port system then comes back and says you can't import that unfortunately it turns out you need you're able to have the following additional information on it access denied you go back and you update your models you resubmit the document it goes through the system and it comes and says okay you can do that so I think in future what you're going to see is that some aspects of the law will literally be presented for use of software by nation states with an assertion that the software is the law

[24:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ&t=1468s) except in the instance of the unforeseen buck and what comes out of that is automation of processes which are currently done very very very manually in a way that theoretically gives you a massively more efficient society so if we go down that path and I think there's a strong sign that we will start with trade facilitation the brexit proposal called max fat maximum facilitation basically suggests having a software-defined border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland those kind of technologies seem very likely to arise and what that gives us is the fusion of the legal profession and the software profession because you wind up in a situation where the law which is produced by the state is produced both as legal texts and ask code and I think that that is how the unification of code and law will occur I don't think it's going to be pushed in a bottom-up way I think what will happen is that for reasons of trade facilitation the state will begin to present sovereign services hours of legal documents which are also executable so that you wind up with statements like you know the correct way of implementing this provision is to use this piece of software and the government stands behind that as the official calculator for this tariff this piece of software over here is an integrated part of our port infrastructure and anything that passes through that system and gets a tax tariff that's the tariff you pay or if it says you can't import you can't import once we're in a position where we've got legal code being produced as computer code we wind up in a position where the law becomes a mixed Canon it has some stuff which is written in natural language some stuff which is written in software and then it goes out into the world on that basis and we shouldn't really be surprised by that because most corporations have systems that work in exactly that way you've got a big employee handbook which is you know your three-ring binder with English in it but you also have computer systems which force you put the numbers into the set of boxes and if you can't raise an invoice using the system because the system says that's not a valid code you can't raise an invoice so effectively we already have these hybrid code law systems running all kinds of systems in the world we already have huge amounts of software used inside of government to represent the consequences of a wall-like Social Security Administration's Tax Office's they'll use software to implement law the sap is simply taking that software and saying

[26:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ&t=1618s) that software is at the law sounds revolutionary but I think that you will see a very gentle shift where you end up producing code to implement policy then eventually clewd becomes the policy I don't know how long that's gonna take and but once it's done I think you'll see the final and complete fusion of law armed software into a single enterprise and I don't think that we're gonna go back from that I think that what you're gonna discover is that we just use more and more and more sophisticated tools for representing reality and that lays down the path towards the situation where you end up with genuine blockchain governance of society where things like the property registers that store ownership of houses also implement the smart contracts which do the legal transfer of property and I think you could see systems that do legal transfer of property on government blockchains run by Sofer nation-states within the next five years so that was it that's why I had to say

[28:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ&t=1680s) thank you so much Vinay we're just gonna roll this into the panel and then after the panel go be time for a Q&A so at this time I'd like to welcome David Siegel who's already on stage called Rieger from them and anastagia of plot Anika okay we do this thank you thank you great gosh so many questions just from that right there I wish I could continue that and we will in the the guise of a form of a conversation on regulation can you hear me all right are you getting me no all right that's okay that better yeah much better all right great I'm going to start by asking Paul and Anastasia to tell us a little bit about themselves and then we can go from there right so I'm acting as an advisor for the blockchain centerville news also because nowadays it's popular to do quite a few things I'm operating officer for global cannabis applications corporation it's a Canadian company that implements blockchain and AI into the medical cannabis industry and also I'm involved in the developing one of the decentralized exchanges and a few other little things and plenty of activities that we do within a blockchain and you're based in Vilnius correct right so I'm Paul I'm the head of business development for named Europe which is a subsidiary of the NEM foundation I'm based in Vienna so my role is mostly finding projects and companies and create synergies between those because right now well everybody's looking for good projects especially being built on public chain and I'm not really seeing too many there so it's really in our interest to find the right partners find the right companies help the companies get trained accredited so they can actually build things themselves without the help of any other third party so that's more less my day-to-day right now when I speak at conferences which is only about twice a week there's a lot of entry in regulation like if there's another car if there's another session on regulation its packed again after like doing four sessions on regulation already why is that why are people wanting to know so much about regulation it's because well I guess we know what

[30:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ&t=1830s) one idea is that it's like well we're trying to tell the future here and figure out how things play out so let's just start from a general point of view and tell me where you think the sticking points are where's the where's the the where are these two trains colliding most are independent world of you know decentralization and the centralized world you've just talked about it quite a bit but where is that where are the clash points and where are the points where we're likely to to go through and you know where's that where are we heading so Vinay well so I think that most of the regulator's remember e-commerce you know there was this point where you just couldn't process credit cards on the Internet and digital signatures weren't recognized as being legal signatures and they've watched a kind of multi trillion dollar industry come out of you know okay we accept digital signatures of signatures and we're going to permit credit card processing on the Internet so they're not automatically hostile to innovation they're trying to figure out you know how you stop the public getting damaged by the future but they're not necessarily anti future the exemption that is basically financial regulators because the experience of financial regulators is basically any time somebody approaches with a smile on their face they're gonna steal you blind robbed you blind rather so you know you get an enormous amount awareness from the financial regulators but everybody else is kind of like okay this is great show me the money but it's the it's the financial regulators are the ones that are causing us the issues because so much of the stuff that's happening on the blockchain is basically the creation of financial instruments in software and then the global retail off those financial instruments without any further oversight and needless to say this goes fan-out to regulators a heart attack up best deaths by heart-attack wouldn't be too bad Oh what do you see so actually I agree completely with the e-commerce example but also qualified electronic electronic signatures in general not only for ecommerce before unborn of customers onto a multitude of different businesses there's actually something that has you know there's lots of it a lot of interest there but it's not done easily because they also have different jurisdictions and it's easy for every for a single business but it's not easy for regulator to just you know a proof of process that's made based on

[33:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ&t=1980s) blockchain on the other hand I strongly believe in hope that security tokens and tokenized securities whatever you want to call them can be one of those well you know pushing pushing the barrier things because if you if you try to solve them if you try to do it right and comply it's not easy you need the help of the regulator you cannot do with the other regulator and that means you even though everybody says you know we discuss when we record this you also need to work with them so I hate that part yeah maybe maybe maybe it's not what people want to hear but I think that that basically that we're forced to do it also helps us more let's try it trying to find a solution for it what do you see well to begin with as a lawyer by trade I'm very happy this regulation became so popular meaning meaning regulation as a topic where people will attend even people of non legal backgrounds so it's a good thing on other hands when when it comes to financial services it is very understandable why regulator and general public are so keen to learn more because everyone's here hearing about general financial stability of the system why cryptocurrencies in blockchain and these two terms are awfully there are you too often a mixed because they think AHA blockchain something wrong is going to happen let's put all our regulatory effort into that and unfortunately fellow colleagues in the space in the last two years the the best practices were not applied and what is very sad commonsense wasn't applied so and now we have the regulatory aspects hitting quite hard even good projects and now it's much harder to speak to the regulator and I agree with the police very important to speak with a regarding the security tokens and plenty of other issues and also enforcement of smart contracts but it became really hard to do after all scandals that happened in the last two years but I think the main collapse comes when when plenty of people started to invest fiat money and lose the fiat money into the whole blockchain Enterprise and that was when the regulator switched on oh you know a year ago it was okay to be a crypto anarchist no we have to go back into our caves and wait let me ask a question is

[35:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ&t=2130s) there any of it any evidence can you guys help me understand if regulation actually helps people at all and let's just you know if you want to just take like I know it helps politicians get their next job but does it and gets reelected but does it help for example that we have anti monitoring laundering in in aggregate is the cost of AML and kyc worth the price does anyone know or can you cite other examples of regulation where yes it's definitely a win here yeah I mean I at this point in history I think of myself as being more of a crypto monarchist and a crypto anarchist so I get the crown that's of italics that's not remotely anyway so the and of course Satoshi who's the perfect King right here gold there's somebody moment of silence for okay oh yeah yeah so so um so this is such a tough question so the bottom line is that human beings love to make rules and they love order right so there's a natural tendency to take anything which is currently free and then gradually make it more and more and more regulated over time and you watch children doing this right yeah they're running around playing some game and they start telling each other the game house rules and you're not going to put the cardboard box over to that corner until you for the red cushion on this one and so I think that this is a natural habit like um you know ants building on hills I think that humans are basically wired to create rules and they're also wired to break rules and it's balance between two natural tendencies and there's no doubt at all from my perspective that the current systems of government have become you know derelict and bankrupt of reason to a truly staggering degree and that's not surprising because we haven't updated the machinery of democracy and for a hundred years you know we should have updated it for adventure telephones we should have updated a telegraph which is updated their railways we should have continually made incremental updates the machinery of democracy so that by now we'd be voting you know 1800 times a year rather than once every four years and as a result you could have a genuinely kind of cybernetic relationship with the government instead the government's have basically not changed their fundamental relationship with the people in about four centuries

[38:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icp1hzXsiMQ&t=2280s) yes since before the Pony Express yeah exactly exactly um so then you put regulation into that context and it becomes a way of enforcing laws which are genuinely pretty shoddy and don't reflect you know the kind of you take for your utopian aspirations at all but if we talk about what the world would look like without those systems you can't just posit no system you have to posit a better system I can but yeah it's really regulations that actually work please I'm searching well launch in space general show me any regulations that really actually help you regulations when we're talking about trade and business activities intentions all the times there but somehow of a very short period of time everything goes to basically yeah with the GDP are it was designed and built the main structure in 2012 so that the blockchain and the concept of blockchain and possibilities and options are just not there so then it hit the market and regulator didn't think that it's necessary to inform the markets properly that yeah this is a especially danger because we can see that regulator was also reckless they know that this business and industry is rapidly developing but then they think they'll figure it out themselves which is a not right way to do it what starts as five pages how somehow ends up at 50,000 pages I'm not quite sure it's that incremental thing there's a there's a natural you know gravity towards this there's a natural energy that keeps adding pages so where is the light where can we see the light that we can start to reach our fingers through and open a crack through bureaucracy I mean you know this is not to say that I mean you know it's the reversal of entropy right so the hope I mean the good news of the bad news so as you turn software into law you begin to get better tools for maintaining the law right well questioning you know because I mean there's well there have been some some attempts it's actually regulate technology and it usually turns out I work at all I'm thinking of this the other way around right so if we took the corpus of law we took the entire legal

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End of [767] Vinay Gupta + Regulation & Innovation panel @ #PillarUnconference Day 3 LIVE | Pillar, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.