# Vinay Gupta - Foreign Policy By Internet Protocol

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [775]. 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, 2015-05-14 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRd3S6H6sc. 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): Strategy for non-state networks dealing with states, relevant to camp legal standing.
- 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)
  - 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)
  - 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)
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (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)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: blockchain / global / internet (27%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: black sky thinking (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); post-state (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Pakistan (2 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 1 undated); Ian Grigg (2 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); North Korea (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); Wall Street (2 here; 24 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Stacktivism (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); solar lights (1 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2011, 1 undated); Estonia (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); cheap solar (1 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2011, 1 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): Ian Grigg
- Importance: core-text score 0.49 (1.00 is the top), number 100 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 0.96)
  - [747] [Startup Societies Podcast - Episode 34 - Vinay Gupta (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/747.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
- On the same works, just before: [234] [zenpundit.com » Blog Archive » WARLORDS, INC BOOK LAUNCH!!! (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/234.md); [115] [Warlords, Inc.: Black Markets, Broken States, and the... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/115.md); [301] [Ilaria R. and Vinay Gupta discuss the Ethereum Project... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/301.md)
- On the same works, just after: [296] [Vinay Gupta - Transparent Society - Crowdfunding on... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/296.md); [171] [Taming Black Elephants (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/171.md); [295] [Singapore talk (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/295.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 - Foreign Policy By Internet Protocol, video, 2015-05-14, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRd3S6H6sc; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [775], https://guptaoption.com/texts/775.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRd3S6H6sc&t=0s) hi everybody um so this is going to be kind of uh black Sky thinking right all the way out of the box all the way to the other side of the field all the way into things which may never happen but probably will um so let's start at the very beginning right it's a talk about foreign policy in an environment where you have no state or at least a post-state environment and we were talking about doing this over the network because it's the only thing that you have in the non-state environment that has any real durability and I really mean this as a foreign policy initiative right now we have all this network activism and all this network activity what we don't have is anyal sense of an ability to transact business at the same level that governments do even though we're essentially providing services at the same level so if you think of something like Wikipedia Wikipedia is doing exactly the same job as UNESCO only instead of having a budget of I don't know half a billion a year it's got a budget of 5 million a year this is foreign policy without a state and we're going to go all the way down this rabbit hole and find some weird stuff at the bottom sound like fun wrong way okay so start at the beginning right we normally think in very constrained ways about what's happening to us in the future and if you don't think in constrained ways uh essentially you run into transhumanist territory really really quickly because it's quite late in the 21st century in a lot of ways so there's this kind of Middle Ground which is a little awkward between business's usual foreign policy and transhumanism and we're in this kind of Middle Ground so if you have transhumanist concerns that are not addressed here that's because we can't touch the transhumanist stuff and remain visible to anything resembling the mainstream I do acknowledge that it is there right so uh that is a quick background for me but bot line is started in Tech wandered into policy still in policy um best known for um this thing the hexayurt and I'm just going to blast through this because most of you have probably seen it before um that is a hexayurt that is a whole sheet of 4x8 in the same way that it comes off a truck it's just plywood you can use anything else roof pieces are half sheets you can also make honking great big domes big 45 squ met structure no need for spherical trigonometry

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRd3S6H6sc&t=150s) designed by a mathematician called Edmund Harris shelter is easy um what you get out of that if you really take the bull by the horns and run with it is the reason the financial system is collapsing over and over and over again is because housing is the last truly inefficient Global industry so houses cost a quarter of a million pounds for a machine that you could construct in a factory for 20 grand and have change left over but because we assemble these things by hand because every single one is different because they lack effective modularity they're incredibly expensive and they are huge entrenched monopolies that prevent us getting into a position where housing is cheap again it's an enormous racket um not everywhere lack of space here in a handful of cities in the world but for everybody else it's purely a housing technology question um hexayurt itself it's been around since 2002 the reason it spreads so slowly is it's a 100% % viral spread project we don't use money to accelerate it because we want the thing to be like a cockroach unkillable a change that cannot be reversed because there's no way to defund it um massively present at Burning Man right there's a satellite pictures we reckon they're building between 1 and 2,000 hexayurts a year at Burning Man net outway between1 and2 million um and they're just they're just everywhere they've become standard something like 10% of burners are in them anyway that's where I came from um what about you what right it's not that often that you get to talk to a room full of people that have actually legitimately changed the world right the Bitcoin Community as a whole has affected real Global change Well Done Right you know other groups that could make that claim Maybe Wikipedia maybe Linux not that many certainly almost none of the political groups right compared to say the green party or the NGS you guys actually solved the problem you went out to solve but right the problems continue everybody's in this kind of libertarian rhetorical frame because it came along with Bitcoin at the beginning many of you will have libertarian politics uh the bad news is that libertarian politics are completely chocolate teot useless in the world we actually live in because even if you can sort out some of this concentration of power stuff you're still left with the

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRd3S6H6sc&t=300s) fact that the economic base that you operate on is driven by slavery so all of the computers that we're using to run all this free software on are manufactured by people in China who don't vote who are under constant surveillance who have very few political lights and who can't unionize to negotiate a fair price for their labor well exactly the same as the people in the UK a couple hundred years ago a lot of the stuff that we fought for here in terms of changes to the industrial law are still to be done in China right there were real victories some of my ancestors down there got lynched for their work on that stuff um the world that we're in is really really problematic right if we had a country that had the same Dynamics as the world as a whole we would think of it as being a place like North Korea not a place like America right seventh of the population in constant hunger millions of people starving to death a year if the entire world was a single country that country would be a basket case it would be in the worst third and we have a very distorted model of this because the 1% line what makes you a member of the 1% globally speaking is an annual income of 25 uh $35,000 a year or about 25,000 right we are a super Elite group looking out at the world saying you know we'd like this to be a little flatter and a little fader but actually beneath us is the other 98% of humanity who are looking at us like you you bastards how did you get all that money and the answer of course is colonialism is how we got that money right we got that money because we stole it faed and square right UK has invaded what 140 of the countries in the world something like that unbelievable land piracy so most of the rhetoric around things like Bitcoin is about upward progress on the pyramid right we want to basically dismantle the monopolies at the head end of society with the objective of making some of their wealth our wealth but oh by the way this is for a video which is really worth watching juice wrap guide the New World Order it's hilarious um that's the problem with moving up the pyramid right it doesn't matter how far up the pyramid you get you're still going to be subject to climate you're still going to be subject to Resource War you're still going to be subject to Fascism right there's really no way out by clambering up to the top end of a sinking ship you have to get down to the engine room and stop the

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRd3S6H6sc&t=450s) ship sinking it's a much much more difficult problem than getting up the pyramid but it also promises actual Solutions right bitcoiners collectively the crypto Community collectively actually has the power to change the way the world Works in a real way you've done it once with a set of political ethics that turn out to have very little leverage on the real problems of the world there is no reason that you couldn't do it again um or modify the work already done done to actually get leverage on the real problems cuz right now fundamentally whether Bitcoin succeeds or fails is going to make zero difference to Global poverty and zero difference to global warming it does not have leverage and it's a shame to see so much effort and so much political power going into a set of causes which are irrelevant to the global situation even if they succeed irrelevant even if it succeeds is a really bad category so right this is the lever the lever is what is going to happen to the world in the next 10 years is roughly what would have happened to 13th century Europe if everybody had been handed a smartphone right I mean if you think about the centuries of war that were produced by the printing press and The Total Transformation and quality of life that was Radical stuff things like that but vastly more radical are coming very very soon all over the developing world right now we've got on the order of 2 billion internet users users the vast majority of Internet users are rich and white right 10 years from now we will have probably somewhere between five and a half and six billion internet users more or less every adult will be on the internet and the internet will overwhelmingly be made of dirt poor brown and black people because that's what the world is overwhelmingly made of and we're going to see a complete destruction of the class and privilege structure associated with the internet the majority of Internet users will be poor peasants talking to each other in languages we don't even know the names of H discussing the problems that they're having growing cassava and that world is coming extremely quickly and with it unbelievable discontinuous change it's more or less impossible to buy dumbphones anymore once you've got smartphones the entire network opens and once the network opens the games begin this is happening right now um has anybody seen the Milla phones $40 smartphone with the entire interface built in

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRd3S6H6sc&t=600s) JavaScript battery life is incredible excellent web browser incredibly robust practically free anybody can afford one so what have we gotten what have we gotten done so far we have this Central Bank of the internet thing and it is astonishing right now that you have a central bank and you've got an identity issuing service in as much as identity equals key pair you begin to get into a position where if you're providing for people many of the same services that the state has traditionally provided for them and this is an enormous reservoir of untapped political power that could be used to do things like defend the crypto Community from the people that would quite like us to stop the stuff we're doing because if you are being astonishingly useful to three billion poor people it's very hard to turn you off without looking like a genocid or Maniac so the poor are not going to remain stuck in the position that we think of them as being stuck in right the notion that if you're a villager and you're a farmer you really don't have any options other than continuing to grow vegetables is being rapidly eroded by Massive technological fixes right Ultra cheap solar panels Mesh networking uh cryptocurrencies the soy filter it's a little widget about maybe this size which will purify 100,000 gallons of water and take out all bacteria for $20 the big one is of the size of a Coke can ow a million gallons including viruses for $100 functionally speaking clean water is now a soluble problem and this is true for almost all of the traditional things which make poverty an unacceptable lifestyle you've got a set of tech fixes many of which came out of camping believe it or not and if you apply that set collectively you can get essentially first world levels of infrastructure in any Village anywhere in the world absolutely game-changing and doable on um realistic budgets you can buy the stuff and people are doing it solar lights have displaced kerosene all over Africa uh I did a project on that a couple years ago for Pakistan 100,000 s rights into Pakistan people love them so here's the first hard question right okay we admit fine all of these poor people are going to get onto the internet it'd be nice to do something who wants to have three billion clients with an average budget of something like $1,000 a year which by the way is middle class for the poor right well the answer is if you've got really

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRd3S6H6sc&t=750s) deeply automated systems you can actually do business at that level and everything still works you can actually make it pay at those kind of levels and as a result you can do business for Visa can't because Visa requires hardcoree identity credentialing because Visa's fundamental business model is that they ensure transactions it's nothing to do with moving money it's everything to do with insurance and you can't Ure risks when you can't get identity so the crypto Community is a the whole is almost certainly going to wind up owning the name space for the very poor right you bind to the phone because of its the crypto keys that are on the phone you bind to the identity because of the user accounts that people make you wind up having the only index of the very poor that exists which mean you're the only person that can represent them or sell services to them you could suggest that Facebook would do that I don't think Facebook is going to have the reach I think you need crypto and Facebook can't deploy it um now let me just check time oh not too bad right so um the mechanisms you put into place affect the set of transactions which get done so if you don't have a position where you can accept Visa you're going to wind up with a different set of customers than if you do and the way that markets respond to relatively small steers on this stuff has radical effects right um the consequence of this is that you're going to wind up with multiple simultaneous markets in most of the areas that actually matter right the whole notion that it's fundamentally about a single Global dominant Force I think is very unlikely um what we're going to see for reasons that I'll explain in a second is a plurality of different marketplaces which are good for different things in the same way that ricardian advantage in classical economics says that the people who are good at producing wine should make mine and the people who are good at producing metal should make metal the same is true in marketplaces so if you think of the world as uh many many many tiers of interlocking marketplaces what comes out of that is this notion that you can have a smooth transmission of different markets from the rich to the poor as a series of overlapping systems it's not I think that we're going to see a single global standard that is all things to all people it's going to be a plethora of smaller games that interoperate and I think that's good news for everybody it's not a fight to the Finish um if you only have a single currency only the transactions which are

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRd3S6H6sc&t=900s) effective to be done with that transaction cost landscape can be managed so if all you've got is US Dollars and you need to pay for something over the internet and you don't have a credit card you're stuck you need to add additional payment mechanisms and right now it's pretty obvious that you know most of your pro of developing World customers for crypto are going to wind up with a set of simple choices local fiat currency Bitcoin ethereum Style smart contracts or other smart contract vendors extr territorial dollars presumably through things like dodgy credit cards from Estonia there's also a whole bunch of local stuff that you can do um maker Fox is a thing for doing local Commerce by identifying um Loops so everybody basically posts what they want to sell and what they want to buy and it identifies economic circuits or economic networks so that you can have a transaction in which nobody winds up any richer or any poorer but everybody gets what they want uh technically it's called Network barter and it uses enormous chunks of computing power on Amazon to identify the maximally optimal set of trads but it's only really practical in a place where you're going to be moving the stuff around by hand or for services delivered over the Internet um there's also Ian Grigg's uh Ricardo stuff that's Ian Grigg right there with the camera um which is a very cever way of um using cryptocurrencies to do accounting for people that want to work work together at the Village level but don't trust each other enough to share a bank account it's a really clever idea um and the reason that you want to do some of this stuff at a small scale locally rather than just relying on enormous Global platforms is about political control the closer you go to the center of the wheel um the more power you have over the political structures that support you uh this is part of a political model called stacktivism um which is all about understanding how the ownership of infrastructure defines political power so how high up the curve is it possible for the poor to get right you've got effective currencies through your cell phone your kids are getting educated with free content on your tablet you're charging everything with solar panels on the roof um you've got tons and tons and tons of improvement in agriculture because you've actually learned how to farm properly and there are prototypes from an out for one acre fund showing doubled agricultural productivity with a one-year training course um uh water is now pure malaria is still a

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRd3S6H6sc&t=1050s) bit of a problem but hopefully somebody will get either vaccine or those anti mosquito lasers you begin to see that there's a potential for quite a high standard of living among the poor without them becoming more dependent on centralized infrastructure or the National Grids to do it and this I think is the real Frontier of Freedom it's villagers that are food self-sufficient with a shopping bad of technology using decentralized Services because they're off the grid autonomous have outright ownership of their land and are very substantially politically free because it's so expensive to police them that it's just not worth sending out somebody in a truck does that sound kind of like fun right um what about the policy stuff right if we're going to be building platforms to support three or four billion people pulling themselves out of poverty and into the global markets um can we do that without getting clobbered and I think the answer is yes I think in fact it's probably the only way for the crypto Community to avoid getting clobbered because again if you are helping the poor out of poverty it becomes politically unacceptable to wall up you whereas if you're putting Wall Street out of jobs Wall Street will eventually figure out how to get you um it's a case of becoming part of the global system doing the work that the global system is too stupid greedy and lazy to do and doing it because it gives us most most of our political objectives and it helps a ton of people and this is a proper Devil's bargain right um what it will come down to is the ability to create something which looks like sovereignty but it has no Center so you wind up building a legal system around things like escrow and from that legal system you get the ability to do global trade between people that don't share a jurisdiction other than the network that they're operating in so if I'm a web designer in Bolivia and I want to sell services is to somebody that lives in Angola in all probability the only mechanism for doing that is going to be these cryptocurrency networks and there's every reason to believe that if you are managing a lot of that kind of trade and doing dispute resolution within it you are now essentially a parate entity um doing much like the same things the UN is doing and I think that there's an enormous amount of reach by taking that kind of Guerilla globalism and pushing it all the way to the edges of the map as soon as the network will allow um alliances right the only way to get

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRd3S6H6sc&t=1200s) through this kind of systemic transformation is to partner with the least evil set of existing incumbent power holders and cut a deal because if we go out there entirely in rebellious mode with no friends the existing Powers will find a way of closing over us you want to take a situation which is kind of 5149 pick the least evil people you can find and get on with and then put your weight on the side of it which will tip it all political progress is uh incumbents cooperating with new cumbers and it's that laminate of a new power and an old Power working together that ensures political change as a movement the crypto Community has to figure out who of the existing powers are our friends because right now the answer is basically nobody and that makes us extremely exposed in the long run we have to find incumbents to protect us CH your money and your takes your choice um that was it thank you very much okay um so there's a there's a bunch of links here uh and I'll put the slides up uh pretty much uh when I go home this evening so you can get the links off there too uh we got time for a couple of questions uh I will then repeat the question so it goes on the tape uh who's first do you want to come forward to ask or just yell questions no questions at all okay that was easy yeah okay people are notrs well so 3G access is already common over most of the planet um it's just that people generally can't afford it very easily um the stuff for the high bandwidth networking that Google and Facebook are talking about doing um my gut feeling is that they're going to get forced into net neutrality by public opinion in the UN so although they'll be

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRd3S6H6sc&t=1350s) providing the internet because it increases their customer base I don't think they're going to wind up being able to do massive locking of the internet in the process particularly in a post Snowden environment I don't think the International Community will let it go um but we'll wait and see plus don't forget Mesh networking um if you do Mesh networking instead of using Wi-Fi frequencies you use some of the stuff that used to be used for analog television you get 15 megabits at 6 km with affordable Hardware and that is a real game Cher um that sounded like it was the first part of two questions what was the second very quickly about public discour on the internet so how do you civil um I don't think there's any realistic hope that it will be civil uh so the question was how do you keep this new civilization civil the answer is there's no way it's going to be civil right Rwanda the genocide ran off the back of uh essentially radio and I don't think we should expect this to be an entirely peaceful transition process because where there is violence people will use things like uh Google Maps to organize their violence more effectively nothing we can do I don't think um any more questions yeah at the back uh you're G to have to yell I can't hear you oh uh so uh the answer is that diversity in architecture is a vice for those that can afford their houses to be sculptures rather than machines how are we doing for time yeah okay um okay so the question is is poverty actually soluble I think that we've completely misunderstood how to measure poverty um the only two numbers I generally pay attention to are infant mortality and length of life and if you just deal with those two numbers you discover weird things like areas of Glasgow which have the same stance as areas of um the Congo right um once you begin to frame poverty in those kind of terms rather than thinking it as just being about cash flow you get a much better representation of people who are

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRd3S6H6sc&t=1500s) say self-sufficient on their own land who in cash terms are very poor but in lifespan are actually doing quite well uh in particular there's a place in India called carola where they've got a dollar a day average income and a life expectancy of I think mid 70s 95% literacy you know they've completely broken the idea that you need cash flow to have uh essentially a high standard of living and once you begin to decouple the idea of income from poverty I think you get much more um you get much more political freedom to design new ways of solving problems um but I think it is a language problem we need to actually decouple these Concepts and start talking about excess mortality rather than deficient cash flow all right done love thank you

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End of [775] Vinay Gupta - Foreign Policy By Internet Protocol. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [296](https://guptaoption.com/texts/296.md) Vinay Gupta - Transparent Society - Crowdfunding on... (2015); 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.