# Vinay Gupta talk, Amsterdam 21/10/2015 (part 2 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [769], part 2 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, 2015-12-08 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE. 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): History of infrastructure control.
- 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)
  - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (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)
- 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)
  - 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)
  - 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)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Cryptography, encryption & cypherpunks (17%); Nuclear war & defence strategy — nuclear, space, military (13%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: global democracy (13 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); political will (10 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); DNS (9 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); proof of work (3 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); PGP (3 here; 16 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Possible Worlds (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); smart contracts (8 here; 110 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); contracts (10 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); Fuller (2 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); basic needs (1 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): Possible Worlds
- Importance: core-text score 0.44 (1.00 is the top), number 142 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [864] [Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin with Vinay Gupta Virtual... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/864.md): close in content (cosine 0.97)
  - [747] [Startup Societies Podcast - Episode 34 - Vinay Gupta (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/747.md): close in content (cosine 0.96)
- On the same works, just before: [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); [759] [Vinay Gupta, Robin Hood Coop London Open Office, August 2015 (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/759.md)
- On the same works, just after: [242] [Dog Atheism: on smart contracts, risk, and value networks (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/242.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 talk, Amsterdam 21/10/2015, video, 2015-12-08, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [769], https://guptaoption.com/texts/769.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[37:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=2250s) bicycles right which are very very very heavily and inappropriately regulated ways which makes it very hard for people to produce the limits of what that technology allows right even in this country I'm guessing that if your electric bicycle goes more than I know 15 mil hour you're going to wind up with some kind of weird regulatory structures around it right China has a huge eruption of w bicycles because they have a regulatory framework that allows them so what happens is that we wind up with these utopian possibilities that are then resuppression because the state can't figure out how to make them legal or figures out that they're going to be bad for some Monopoly or for society in general and then takes them back out again and this is the dynamic which is beginning to build up around the entire cryptocurrency Revolution which is currently ongoing right we're at another one of these historical inflection points where a truly revolutionary technological potential is being made manifest and now we see what the response is from the forces that will either standardize it into the mainstream and it'll become a part of how life is for everybody or it will become a technological Backwater like the gdig doome and that decision is going to be made really globally within the next 5 years because we're going to decide whether or not processes like Bitcoin and ethereum are fully legal instruments of a kind of global Civil Society or whether they are banned and made into this underground semi Criminal kind of Underworld activity right are we building the infrastructure for a single World in which it's possible for any human being to transact business with any other human being or are we going to baniz and break this stuff up into a bunch of government LED Bitcoins one per currency that currently stand dollar coin Euro coin Yen coin and this entire process could go either way it's a historical Choice Point um I'm going to talk a little bit about what smart contracts are and then I'm going to talk about how we're going to constitute World court whether it's going to be done through the UN or whether it's going to be done on the internet like normal people would do it and then I'm going to open for questions um but I want to kind of prep the ground by saying the idea that the internet should be self-regulating and that contracts which exist only on the internet should probably have legal processes that only exist on the internet as a way of uh manag in them is not a crazy idea right if you go to all

[40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=2400s) this work to create a single Global computer network that reaches into every corner of planet Earth the idea of dragging your nation state governments along with you when you want to make decisions about how the internet governance itself should seem completely absurd and the fact that it doesn't is only an accident of History because somebody decided that domain names should have nation state identifiers in them that's how the state got its foothold on the internet and if you're a young engineer never make this mistake so um how many people here own some Bitcoin okay maybe 10% uh how many people think they understand Bitcoin reasonably well okay would one of you like to explain it right what about smart contracts in ethereum does anybody has anybody heard of a smart contract okay so I'm going to give you five minute primer on how these things work and then then from there we can talk about you know what the need is for Global governance around these kind of instruments so um in the beginning there is the database 1970s technology it's essentially a single machine with an enormous file in it and you pour content into the file and you know it all gets stored there and you've got processes uh called Atomic transactions which sound much cooler than they are so an atomic transaction is just a transaction which is indivisible in the same way that an atom was once thought to be indivisible so maybe we should call them I don't know neuron proton transactions anyway so you have this indivisible transaction which is something like update the bank account and you know number one and subtract it from bank account number two and that's a single unit of banking and your database processes these units of banking and it processes them in the order that they received at a central Hub and that system runs runs the world from 197 something to today all the way through every institution that you deal with somewhere in there there's a database that runs on Atomic transactions and the entire thing runs on a single access point and a queue of transactions that come in one after another uh and the order in which those transactions are done is typically the order that they're arrived in except when an American Bank uh is going to process payments which will cause your uh account to become overdrawn in which case they'll process the biggest uh payments first and then they'll hit you

[42:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=2550s) with an overdrawn charge for every single small payment on the long tail so they would specifically reorder the transactions as the maximum fee to the customer and this is the kind of thing that happens when people mess with the natural order of reality and start reordering the transactions as they go into databases like bad things happen so when the Bitcoin guys decide that they want to build a decentralized currency they know they're going to need a database but there's no single point so imagine that we've got computers scattered all over the world that are all sharing the same database so if you send a message the message will reach those computers at different times depending on how far away you are from the computer and how fast the computer networks are between you and them so if we've got computer stuff scattered all over the world and we are here and somebody else is in China and we both do a transaction in the same instant the machines in the world will hear about those transactions in two different orders depending on where they are on the globe the machines close to China will say the Chinese transaction were first the machines in Europe will say the European transaction was first and uh the result will be that the database will uh split because one part of it will say that the Chinese transaction were first and the other part of it will say the European transaction was first and as a result there won't be any way to keep this single Global database in agreement with itself and this is unfortunately not a problem that goes away uh with any level of Technology short of an atomic clock so Google to solve this problem put atomic clocks in all of their uh computer uh uh you know facilities in all their data warehouses server Farms that's the word I was before so they put an atomic clock in each one and their software understands general relativity and life speed delays so they've created a single artificial moment called now and all of their computers sync to that and it takes an enormous amount of Hardware in physics to make sure that that synchronization remains constant and this is how Google solves the problem of how do you synchronize a Global Network the blockchain guys didn't have the ability to put atomic clocks every single node so they came up with a thing called Mining and Mining is essentially temporary centralization so you know in the mining process you

[45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=2700s) basically have a bunch of people who are running computers to prove how hard they are and the guy who happens to be hardest on that round is appointed the Zar the central point for a single 10minute window and we call that window a block in that block all of the transactions that are in the block are put into an order that this guy suggests and then that is published globally as being the next block in the thing called a blockchain so blockchain is a series of temporary sovereignties one after another that go to the person that presents the most what they call proof of work you basically just have a computer it goes super fast the faster it is the more like who you are to be appointed the next blocks are you then put together the transactions in an order that you consider good and you put them back into the network any transactions that weren't in the block can be picked up by the next block and so on and henceforth As you move forward and this process is called a blockchain uh it's subject to a thing which is called eventual consistency so it is not Apparent at any given instant whether the current block is the correct block because somebody on the other side of the world might have made a better block or at least a different block and there could be some delay in that reaching you because the internet cable has been hit by a shark or whatever it is so the system has a certain amount of slack in it where if you discover 20 minutes afterwards that there's a better block around you can switch them out your mind and decide that that block is the legitimate block but generally speaking within an hour or two hours Global consensus is reached everything is locked down and we agree that we've got a stable Global database without having any sign significant centralization on the way did that make any sense at all or was that arm waving science fiction for people kind of sort of uh kind kind of sort of is good enough right just as long as you remember that the problem is that computers on the other side of the world hear about things in a different order because of the delays caused by the speed of light and that the solution to that problem is mining you're good that's all you really need to know so the first yeah I have one question about this you're solving a hard problem like the one solving the hardest problem is the one that the the T for the moment m um but if it comes to this eventual consistency it seems like as long as you

[47:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=2850s) can randomly point someone s for a moment uh do I don't get why is so important to uh solve these really difficult problems in the process does that actually solve something else under water or what's going on there okay so the question is why don't you just randomly pick somebody um the answer is that what you would if you just randomly picked somebody you know what you would get is essentially spam somebody's so somebody makes 200 million fake users uh you know four times out of five one of their fake users turns out to be the guy that picked blocks are and then you wind up with that person essentially dominate uh the entire network because they made more fake users than anybody else and then to get some semblance of fairness what you wind up with is simply a competition to see who can generate more fake users so instead of having a competition to build fake users we have a competition to do mining problems so the IDE is like you make something so hard that it's too hard to actually make fake exactly problem that's why you solve hard problem you you solve the hard problem to stop people just making enormous numbers of fake users and then dominating the system politically by having fake fake users in the system but the problem that solved is not actually solving anything more as well except for that's right yeah the problem being solved is essentially just a proof of wasted electricity right it's a really really awful way of doing things it just happens to be the thing that we figured out that worked first so it's one of these things that was essentially a hack that turned out to work and now we're stuck with it for another generation we cannot like make that problem I the set program um so the problem the problem with problems right there's a whole bunch of theory around this stuff called proof of work but if you pick a problem which has additional uses right so imagine that we build a perfectly efficient system we use the waste electricity for heating water for a swimming pool or something like that and we so and the problem that we're going to solve is a problem that somebody is going to solve anyway like seti at home or physics calculations from CERN in that situation we create a system where there's essentially no cost in making a fake user because uh all of the resources are being recaptured by the system right if you're not actually sacrificing anything there's nothing stopping you making fake users so the more efficient your process is the more vulnerable is the people making fake

[50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=3000s) users on it this is of course completely infuriating right this is this is the worst of all possible worlds but this is the kind of perversity of Economics we just wind up in a situation for fake users turn out to be the least B alternative that we know of so you're saying if you link it to for example the calculations for SEI then SEI has a reason to invest in this process and F makes a bunch of fake users in the process yeah that's exactly what I'm saying it's it's just it's the kind of perversity that you always get when you economics and rational actors inside of systems theory it's horrendous there are different uh efforts to Sol to find useful applications but the problem is that the solutions which have to be found for for which the miners are doing their efforts they need not to be they need to be nonpredictable M so I mean they they are looking into this but it's very difficult because uh yeah it's an absolute Pig it's a really hard problem so everybody got in their head this kind of notion of a global database and to sequence the things in the right order you need some kind of temporary Authority which is these Zars which are the guys that make blocks does that kind of sort of make sense because now we're going to go on Smart contracts and smart contracts are really horrendous so imagine that in this database instead of storing code oh sorry instead of storing transactions like money Bitcoin instead we store programs so suppose that I store a program uh in this distributed database right we have this Global database and I take a piece of code from my machine and I upload it and it's spread across all of the nodes in the entire network because it's in the database does everybody see that that would be possible you'd wind up with hundred of thousands of copies of some piece of code okay now um computers being computers if you run the same program with the same inputs you should always get the same output right they call this deterministic and it's the nature of computers to be deterministic in fact it's really hard to get them to be anything other than deterministic except when you're debugging software so this deterministic system where you take the code and you run it everywhere and it comes back with the same answer is the foundation for programming uh a

[52:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=3150s) global sort of computer system same code runs everywhere gives you the same outputs predictable system so you take the kind of distributed database thing from Bitcoin you throw it out and improve it so it goes 10 or 20 times as fast as you call it ethereum and then instead of storing programs you store code and we call this code a smart contract so every body agrees on the output of the code this is super critical suppose that we have um a uh game right we want to play competitive tic tac toe on the blockchain right so we have the rules of uh knots and Crosses embedded in a smart contract and the move that each player makes is made by writing a little uh an action into the blockchain and at the end of that process we can have a global agreement about who won that game right imagine a secure fully trusted Global contest for playing tic Taco doesn't that sound amazingly useful well okay so you know maybe it's a silly example but suppose that you were doing it for something like International chess every single move that's made is checked into the system one after the other the rules of Chess are embedded in the smart contract it's impossible to make an legal move and everybody in the world can verify what the outcome was almost any system where you have direct competition between people and you need a fair set of rules can be managed by a system with a smart contract in it what are they doing through that they don't agree with you I guess ah so inside of this sort of system anything that you can represent as a piece of software where where you want to be able to prove what the output from the piece of software is can be put into this distributed database run everywhere in the world simultaneously and everybody agrees on what the outputs are kinds of things that you might want to do that way when you go to google.com it'd be really nice if everybody in the world got the same google.com as a result right when you go to Amazon you always want it to go to Amazon and right now that system is controlled through this thing called DNS which is a hack that was made 20 years ago by a bunch of people over the course

[55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=3300s) of a summer that just needed a system that worked and they baked all these crazy assumptions into it so what we could create would be a completely Fair alternative to DNS provably Fair globally distributed domain name browser you type in a domain name it talks to the global database it says where should I look for this comes back with the result you go off you go to the domain name and then you could have a system where every year these domain names are for example auctioned or maybe if you've already owned the domain name you could continue to own it but if you forget to pay it becomes available or we could have a system where you've got to do some kind of proof of work thing so that we could finally put an end to domain name squatting where some idiot gets hold of your domain name and then you can never get it back again right we could get into a system where your governments didn't have the ability to decide whether or not you could have a domain name we could take a global asset in this case domain names and distribute them in a provably fair way to the entire world we could do this for things like uh book or music publishing right we could store the databases about who created human knowledge and who should get paid when a specific piece of knowledge or music is used and we could build a single global system that managed that in a completely transparent way um there's an English artist called image and Heap uh who turns out to have a lot of skill as a technologist and she's sitting there basically doing the architecture for a project called Melia which is a an approach to doing music distribution and music Rights Management over a blockchain so that everybody in the world can agree who recorded a piece of music and all the financial agreements around the piece of music are walked into the smart contract so they're visible to the entire world and when you make a payment the money is Auto automatically sent to the people that are named in the smart contract does that sound like a better fairer world compared to a huge number of aate contracts locked inside of huge corporations whose lawyers specialize in making life difficult for musicians that have existed for 100 years to do just that all of those systems are potentially in play now as things could be replaced with transparent technology which is open source and therefore doesn't have charges to use remember what I said about these historical decision points where

[57:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=3450s) technology comes and opens up the potential of better world and people either take it or they don't so we could fix the domain name system we could fix music if you ask some people they'll say that we could fix Finance as well um imagine knowing exactly who owned every single share of every company on Earth so that you could go and look at exactly what it was that was being done when these people voted to control a company imagine if we could track all the world's natural resources in single Global public systems that everybody agreed were provably fair and so you could completely understand exactly who is profiting from say deforestation in Malaysia all of that is within our reach but we have to insist on the world in which these things are true rather than being speculative possibilities like Buckminster for's plan for producing enough denim jackets for the entire world right without the political will the technologists can continue to generate utopian possibilities that Humanity will simply ignore as it slides further and further and further into the gutter of History it needs political Awareness on behalf of the political radicals to understand the full implications of Technology because if we don't have political rad radicalism combined with technological sophistication we're going to g w in a world where all the decisions about technology are made by people that don't understand the possibilities on the table and as a result we'll fail to fully exploit those possibilities so did you have a question oh I was I was thinking don't you think that eventually it will become so obvious imagine if you could buy for example solar panels for like $2 and and uh uh de install decentralized uh water selection purification system in every neighborhood at all for just a fraction of what it costs now it becomes so obvious that this is the the way to go that this political will that you speak of will just yeah yes so I do I do so the question is basically you know when these Technologies become incredibly cheap won't they simply push the worst technology away right you so we stop building nuclear power plants because solar is cheaper yes that's absolutely true uh and a lot of people talk about that some people use terms like market-based environmentalism um the problem is that

[1:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=3600s) what you'll wind up with in potential if there is no political will is they'll turn you know 20% of the land mass of Spain into an enormous solar panel array and then they'll charge you through the nose for your electricity and make it illegal to put solar panels on your roof which is what they've done in Greece you know there's something like a 20,000 fine is it Greece or Spain that has the enormous f so in Spain they've got something like a €2,000 fine if you CAU the solar panels on your roof that's exactly what I'm trying to point out is that for example um what we see happening right now in the United States with uh um marijuana it's it's become the the anti- marijuana um politics has has become um the laws have become unenforceable because people are just not willing to submit anymore well I mean certainly the in America the kind of you know long process of attenting to make marijuana legal right how long has it taken a hundred years 120 years right and then look at gun control oh yeah indeed right I mean they still have terrible regulations on guns in America they make it really hard to get a firearm optimism I'm being optimistic Reas on both sides you know and the fact that they've managed to keep their guns this long is an enormous victory for the Americans but that's another story so um you know cuz these things go together right if you're going to have Bitcoin you buy well better have a rifle so the I was in America a really long time so I promise you that I was going to talk about global courts right now this is proper proper radicalism right um so let me start with the possibility we could have GL democracy just about anytime we want it and there's really no political movement globally asking for it but the technological barriers to have Global democracy are largely removed um I can't remember where I came across the critical Insight but I didn't think of it myself somewhere I read a very simple idea which is that you could have Global democracy based on statistical modeling you don't need 100% of the population to vote you need enough of the population to vote that the results are statistically

[1:02:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=3750s) significant so if you've got say 60 million people voting and you know roughly what their biases are because they live in some set of countries rather than other places on average then you can basically model roughly how the global population would have voted if we'd had one person one vote for the entire world and if it's anything like 50/50 you simply decide that the answer to your question was no but if it's it's overwhelming land side support based on the statistical modeling you've done you suggest the answer is yes so Facebook right now has a billion users all over the world and that's clearly enough people that you could do a statistically modeled basis for Global democracy from the Facebook user base right now same thing is true for Google right and overall we've got something like I know 2 and a half or three billion people online at the moment that number is only going up as poor people all over the world get smartphones and get their first internet access pretty soon every human adult is going to have a least basic internet so we can move from a statistically sampled Global democracy to an actual one adult one vote Global democracy within 5 or 10 years so why is nobody asking for Global democracy but isn't it still quite a specific demographic which has access to Faceook in comparison to the rest of the population um so right now that is true right there are fewer poor people that have access to Facebook but within five or 10 years it really will be everybody these things are getting cheap really really quickly so if you were building the kind of statistical model of this Global democracy you'd have to take the votes of people that were poor and you'd have to give them lots of weight because if there are only 300 people voting from the city in bangl adesh you know that they've got views that are representative of you know 5 million people in the early days a system like that would be very imprecise you have to then fill that stuff in with real data as you begin to get more and more people online but the question is right why is there no Global pressure for Global democracy given that we've got the technological capability right the engineers have built the technical capability for a global democracy why aren't we building one trust trust trust you don't think we trust democracy we don't trust each

[1:05:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=3900s) other we don't trust each other I think we don't trust democracy either that's what I was going to say the Democracy that we already have is completely in and is broken so why do we want to build why want a bigger one right yeah possible like here is bad Europe is worse don't even think about but what what what kind of democracy are we talking about well talking representative elected democracy oh well here it's a problem obviously so this is the question right what what kind of democracy would we want if we were going to have Global democracy I I wouldn't see that as immediately getting rid of our national governments I would see it as being the level on top right maybe we could have a global democracy that dealt with global issues like the environment how are we going to manage the planetary atmosphere that seems like a job for the entire world's people to talk about so maybe we could have a global democracy that specifically managed climate risk and maybe a few other global issu issues like say pandemics right so you could take the problems which the nation states have been very very poor at solving I think we can all agree that the national governments have basically completely failed on climate they've done next to nothing so we could take the areas where the current Global regime is completely failing and we could start talking about replacing it with a genuinely representative Global regime made of ordinary people voting on their smartphones there there's there's a danger I I say like mhm truth is not measured in Mass appe I'm afraid that not yeah I I absolutely agree that truth isn't measured in Mass Appeal but how are we going to run the world if not democracy we're not going to run the world I I think nobody should run the world well unfortunately if nobody takes control we're just going to continue to produce carbon to the point where we've got six degrees of warming and Global agriculture fails you a very big smart computer to yeah who programs the computer right so just too much control I'm very skeptical of what you say about if if uh we don't have somebody to to rule that to impose some kind of regulation on that that we will just continue to uh produce some car it seems to be what we've done so far voluntary regulation of our carbon emissions has achieved essentially nothing we're moving away from that

[1:07:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=4050s) right slowly maybe too slow I don't know yes I mean we've certainly got plenty of solar panels right but um we've still only got something like 1% or 2% of the global energy production is renewable although more than half of the new energy which was installed in America in 2014 was renewable energy it's still only a very small part of the total Energy System so even if all of the energy systems that we build now are renewable the existing systems will still take 15 to 30 years to collapse and be replaced so basically to in order for the world not to have something like six degrees of warming we have to leave I don't know hundreds of billions of dollars of oil and coal and gas reserves in the ground and never take them out and the political will to stop the people that own the oil and gas reserves mining stuff and burning it you know Saudi Arabia can produce oil for something like2 or3 a barrel renewable energy to get rid of the need for that oil is going to have to come down by a factor at 10 or 20 and we don't really have the time right Renewables can compete with oil when oil is on the on the order of $100 a barrel but if they begin to sell it closer to production it's way cheaper than Renewables are yes do you know anything about um carbon storing carbon sequestration right where you just put it back into the ground um the bottom line is there are lots of people looking at different approaches nobody's cracked it yet right lots of experiments nothing definitive when basically when you pump it into the ground it's got a really bad habit of coming back up against somewhere else I mean with large scale ecosystem varability ah well I mean it's certainly possible to do it with large scale ecos system Rehabilitation but where's the political will yeah so but nature is kind of like solving the problem but because strees they eat carbon uh that's unfortunately not going to help us because we're cutting down the trees far faster than they're eating the car hang on let's go back to the smart contracts in the courts so the point the point that I'm driving towards is this right we have the technological possibility of doing Global democracy we've got clear failures to govern at the very highest level that threaten the entire human race of which climate is only the most visible and there are another half a dozen issues

[1:10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=4200s) that are at least that large if not larger uh nanotechnology and biotechnology regulation I would Point as being just as important as climate they're just a little further out so all of this blockchain technology gives you the ability to verify and validate Global Systems it's the ability to audit the world this is really what the blockchain is it's the ability to audit the world and if we put the right kind of political pressure on governments and corporations to make themselves fully transparent we could audit the world and as a result we could get a better world and there's a real Global urgency for doing this um these smart contract things because they're more sophisticated than just starting a transaction because you can have some real complexity in them because they're software potentially you could represent eological Assets in smart contracts so you could have a sort of smart contract representation of a forest and then every year you have somebody go out and do an assessment of the health of the forest and putop the data back into the global blockchain and with systems like that you could get an accurate map of what the global ecological situation is you could track the people that are cutting down the forests and you could show where their profits are being found hidden and you could find them recover them so so once again what I'm basically saying is we've got a choice Point we've got a set of technologies that could potentially give us a global system of accountability which we could use to manage environmental risk and we've got a set of Technologies on the table that could potentially give us the ability to have Global representative democracy or at least the global issues that are in front of us but it's up to Ordinary People to generate the political will to put these systems into production to save the world because otherwise what you're going to see is another 40 or 50 years of failure of democracy to actually deliver anything resembling sensible environmental policy and the long-term outcome will be six degrees of warming the collapse of Agriculture and God only knows what kind of right-wing extremism in response to the hardships that that puts Humanity through right the engineers can continue to make these things possible but it requires political will to make them actual question your positioning smart contracts is way to enforce that but is isn't there the same problem isn't there

[1:12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=4350s) the same enforcing problem that you say someone has to go and measure Forest someone has to say no to comp cut down a tree isn't that I say real world they can be be not true in in the in the terms of the cont oh yeah absolutely but isn't you need same as way there there are lots and lots of different approaches to that problem involving you know sort of legal structures and ask or agreements or uh automated surveillance from things like satellites there are lots of different ways of approaching it but if you would have those okay andal is not yeah legal stuff and cont I can so the reason that you need the blockchains and the smart contracts is that if somebody's this gets kind of technical but if somebody's going out to do a survey on a patch of forest and they submit a bunch of evidence and store it in a blockchain if you then send a second team out there and they do the survey work again and they discover the first person was lying you know exactly who lied and you have everything that they promised on you know in a completely permanent visible record so it makes it really easy to get accountability when somebody distorts the data it's a Global decentralized Network so there is no Central Authority behind it that control can control that so that once that the rules are have have been launched are there no one can stop it no one can censor the information there so if there's information that is valuable for the entire world to know and you put it there no one else can say I don't I want to hide that or I I want to take it back it can't be taken back permanent that that that can be extremely valuable but it also has a dark side because in might information you don't want to get out there bad people would do bad things with it and put I don't know plant to the atomic bomb out there for everyone to see as well but that that's exactly what what what it is it's extremely valuable but it also has a dark side as well yeah so that was basically everything I had to say about this um thank you for listening sh [Applause]

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End of [769] Vinay Gupta talk, Amsterdam 21/10/2015, part 2 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [242](https://guptaoption.com/texts/242.md) Dog Atheism: on smart contracts, risk, and value networks (2016); the most closely related, [864](https://guptaoption.com/texts/864.md) Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin with Vinay Gupta Virtual... (2018); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.