# COP26 Event: Green Blockchain, Green Economy (part 2 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [791], 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, 2021-11-22 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA. 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): Green-capitalism framing of the contracting layer at COP26.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Sheet-waste question (1995): The question behind the Hexayurt: how to build a dome from 4x8 sheets without wasting 25 to 40 percent of...
  - 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)
  - A Blockchain Solution For Identity? (2017): Keynote to the Dutch Blockchain Coalition (BC3) at Techruption: insurance as the way to make different... (suggested by machine)
  - Internet of Agreements (2017): Paper at the World Government Summit in Dubai on producing legal agreements at industrial scale. (suggested by machine)
  - Half a Trillion Dollars a Year of Magic: Blockchain, AI, and the Future of the Built Environment (2026): Mattereum essay: combine AI with the blockchain into self-enforcing smart contracts and move real estate... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - 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: Other speakers / contributors — searchable, not Vinay voice (42%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (10%); Smart contracts, law & arbitration (10%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: semantic web (7 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); circular economy (10 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); doubt discount (3 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2020); DAO (4 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); COP26 (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2021); legal layer (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); second-hand (2 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); political will (2 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); self-sovereign identity (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); NFT (3 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2019)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): COP26
- Importance: core-text score 0.29 (1.00 is the top), number 266 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [251] [ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/251.md): same career work: Sheet-waste question
  - [752] [Vinay Gupta: The Cities That Will Walk Away (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/752.md): same career work: Sheet-waste question
- On the same works, just before: [733] [Trust models, founding Mattereum, and 'Turning Law into... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/733.md); [768] [#03 - Vinay Gupta : History of Money, Foundations of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/768.md); [717] [The Novum Insightful - Ep1: Vinay Gupta | CEO of Mattereum (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/717.md)
- On the same works, just after: [714] [Autonomous A1 - Taming Capitalism with Vinay Gupta of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/714.md); [678] [WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with Vinay Gupta (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/678.md); [790] ['Mattereum is Blockchain Cypherpunk' (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/790.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: COP26 Event: Green Blockchain, Green Economy, video, 2021-11-22, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [791], https://guptaoption.com/texts/791.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[1:29:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=5399s) what you want to do i've actually seen there's currently on the ethereum chain there is a dow climate i think that lets you do carbon offsets continuously i've seen a renewable certificate trading actually happen i don't think it ever got to any scale but it's certainly there and there's also have been some attempts around having certifiably green bitcoin because of course you can see the address that it comes from so providing that you've got you know a regulatory system in the states that can say everything that's mined from this address has come from renewable energy you could well find that that would actually trade as a premium um but there are a lot of possibilities i'd also stack on there have been various arguments made that the bitcoin encourages renewable energy which i'm a little bit dubious about simply because the cheapest power that's available now is actually peak day solar you know some grids like california are in the position where they're paying people to take the energy off the grids um i think it depends very much on the structure of your energy system but but i think it's an interesting argument and it does show that you know these things depend a lot on like what energy sources you have available to you and when thank you thomas john you've done a lot of work on uh the types of energy systems and and how they how they allocate energy what are your thoughts on this question um i think i'd just just just repeat what i said that renewable energy is precious and there's an opportunity cost to using renewable energy the opportunity cost of not using it for something else so you know i i i'd really come back to that message of our power as as consumers as designers of of community projects to make choices in terms of the blockchain protocols that we use and to choose those that are more efficient thank you john are there other questions did i see a hand at the back there no well in that case perhaps uh i can ask a question um we we witnessed the historic occasion of

[1:32:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=5549s) the avalanche blockchain going carbon neutral first first in the world um do we think does the panel think that uh the incentives are strong enough and in place for others to follow shall we start with Vinay um so the the size of the transformations that we need to get this kind of global impact um you know middle class americans the top 10 percent are currently at roughly 70 tons of co2 per person right now per household per person a sustainable limit if we'd implemented it 20 years ago would have been two tons per person so to get from where they are now to a fully sustainable level requires the total annihilation of the current energy system in most of the manufacturing fortunately that total annihilation is underway right now it's called solar panels or cheaper than coal at which point nearly all of the energy which has been installed in america this year and the previous year is renewable nobody's really putting in coal or natural gas in the states anymore and as america goes the rest of the world will follow um so that's the underlying kind of landslide mega trend which is moving us towards a sustainable world most of this stuff out here with cop and all that running around it's basically circus right you can accelerate the transition to a renewable world by putting a price on carbon that simply makes carbon more expensive it accelerates the transition simply because you take situations where the coal was kind of sort of holding its own and now cold well you can't really afford to run the coal plant and pay the carbon taxes you just shut the thing down um the harder questions are sort of then what right like getting into a world where you have you know solar powered robot chainsaws that are failing the remaining of your forests and the hyper consumption runs on but it's now all solar powered that's sort of the next wave that we're going to hit right even as you begin to get some kind of a grip on the energy problem the next problem right behind that is the land use problem and that is the one where there is no easy fix right you know mass vegetarianism clean meat the rest of that stuff is the best shot we have on land use but getting people to the point where they're just not eating animals anymore

[1:34:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=5699s) and all that land or much of it has gone back to nature that's not an easy place to get to from where we are unless the biotech guys deliver the same kind of miracle that the solar guys have delivered um you know the incentives make it possible to accelerate the development of things like solar of things like the queen meat agenda you know if you start saying in 10 years we're going to have a 20 cents per burger hamburger tax people can take that to venture capitalists and say fund or clean meet startup and it's the certainty of those long-term actions is really the point of something like cop people commit to something in future you can then take that commitment out to the investors and the investors will then begin to act on it um this is where professor menelli's stuff from yesterday comes in because his approach is the government's change their mind all the time so they have to issue bonds which will track their performance and if they don't deliver and you've bought those bonds they have to pay you and that allows you to hedge the risk the governments will weasel on their commitments this is a very long way of saying you can make this stuff work with incentives but people need to be willing to tie themselves to the masts to get that done and right now we are not in a position where anybody is willing to tie themselves to the mast right if you think of the kind of radical furious enthusiasm that you have from the activists and imagine that in government we could fix this problem and that stuff happens in government all the time that was the nuclear age it was the space race it was the laying of the fiber optic cables in which we now run the internet once in a while government will get hold of something and just they'd go for it the iraq war is another example that so until you see that kind of attitude you know that enthusiasm go from activists to government we're not going to get the kind of nailing your colors to the mast action that is required to create the incentives for capital to then back those radical options um and it's going to be a many many tier fight right there is carbon there is land use right behind that there's the nanotechnology struggle which is is the world gonna wind up clogged up with misbehaving nanotechnology and then we've got ai to contend with so you know in a lot of ways this is the first round in what's going to be a century of a fight between humans and capital for control of technology right is any technology that generates money good technology or do we have

[1:37:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=5849s) essentially a gate that opens and closes selectively where we say okay this technology is okay we let it through the technology is not okay moratorium and if you think of this entire struggle in that light you know that that regulation problem for technology and the ability to select what technologies will adopt and what technology we won't is the encompassing struggle for all of these problems from uh climate onwards through everything else that we're dealing with in the 21st century which is you know a very volatile period um and how you do incentives when you start thinking about technological gating i think that is going to come down to a much more rigorous use of litigation to punish the people who are responsible for technological disasters thank you veneer john you talked uh about the power of ethical consumer choice to drive the net zero vision uh including uh including net zero blockchains do you think that power is strong enough to incentivize other blockchains in the near future to follow avalanche and go net zero well i mean i i certainly hope so i think that more more generally this question of our incentives strong enough that this we will always live with with this question and we you know we we live we live in a changing constantly changing situation and so the answer to that will constantly change and and the good news i think is that we're developing more tools to help us engage with that and my my hope for my relatively brief engagement um with blockchain so far is that blockchains are providing us with a bigger and bigger armory with which we can provide greater traceability greater accountability uh and just just more tools um so in many ways the the the blockchains themselves are the incentive i mean that i i have hope that that's that that will be the case uh thomas you talked about the various mechanisms by which by which the the chains function um are they capable of changing um i mean i to be honest i'd argue that they kind of largely already have

[1:39:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=5999s) um there's been no i mean i mean really proof of work is a bit like coal it's dirty it's clumbersome it doesn't actually perform very well it was just something that we kind of knew how to do and similarly to coal i'm not aware of any major proof-of-work blockchain having launched in the last four or five years i mean really there's there's bitcoin um which is i say an ideologically committed group um i mean it's rigid would imply that they couldn't change i would say committed they don't want to change um and there's there's ethereum where to be honest it's just too long and they know that they're going to move to proof of stake so so i would say that in many ways the proof-of-work issue is kind of just legacy and that's the question of whether or not chains are going to offset themselves i would say at the slight risk of undermining your previous message that it it probably doesn't matter that much if they do or don't because once you've taken the burning 20 pound notes out of the equation generally speaking the screens of all the devices of the people using the network will actually be a much bigger energy draw anyway but the very fact that it's possible is extremely encouraging and i think for any chain that has a strong sponsoring organization um or that can find the water waiting mechanism for doing it they probably will do offsetting and probably will go net zero because it's good pr and the costs are not actually that high if your consensus mechanism doesn't rely on wasting electricity thank you thomas uh bernard echoing back to what what when i was talking about do you think uh from the work that you have done that international mechanisms are capable of uh providing these that's a very good question indeed uh so theoretically there is potential um that i think is quite clear now the big question is how do you get states as the primary holders of sovereignty in the in the international system to to to sign on to it right so you need the

[1:42:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=6149s) powerful states on board so you know things like enforcement certainty can also backfire right so i lay out some ways in which this could be made a little bit more incentive compatible but ultimately you know it it really hinges on bringing in all stakeholders right so that you can benefit from these cross-level interactions through a common token so in a way yes um i'm optimistic thank you uh we're nearly out of time we have uh time for one more question uh gentleman over there in the in the in the center of the room there please with the mic uh please say who you are my name is ryan stoddart i suppose my question can go across the panel um if we see bitcoin as the new call what do you imagine the future for it to be uh thomas perhaps you can start since that was your analogy gosh um i think in a lot of ways i'm not actually that qualified to answer the question um because as a pure cryptocurrency that i mean the future of bitcoin really depends on what happens about the price and i think that that is something that has long since cease to be decided by people who write code for a living um i would i mean the question whether or not bitcoin persists is probably a question of whether or not the crypto ecosystem as a whole actually matures i think for as long as it's all the question of number goes up bitcoin is a very very very very strong brand in that it's something everyone's heard of a non-negligible percentage of world's population hold it even if it's not very much will carry on if we do get you know the hard rain that washes away the false solutions from the streets as i think vinay's been alluding to um then i would imagine that the bitcoin would probably just slink away like the altcoins um although generally speaking any time that i've said something disparaging about bitcoin it's just gone up um and it it's very hard to tell thank you lightning network is very interesting it might have a bit of resurgence thank you thomas uh bernard what does

[1:44:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=6299s) the future of of of bitcoin and other and other chains look like i think this comes right back to the question of the blockchain governance right so to what extent um is there an evolution possible in the hardwired rules through which the blockchain rules evolve right and i think blockchains will have to demonstrate that they can deliver on their promises and you know offer shared prosperity for everyone i think that is the best insurance against extinction thank you uh john what are your thoughts well i i guess one way to to think about the question if bitcoin is a new coal what will happen to bitcoin well what is happening to coal so we've seen massive divestment from coal and from we've seen commitments in the past week or so and by a lot of countries to end new coal projects and so you know if if there's been talk about political will if there is the political will or if there is the consumer will then you know it's clearly possible that bitcoin could go could go that same way thank you john uh vinay uh i i guess uh you've done a lot of thinking in your career about the future not just of cryptocurrencies and blockchains but the future of humanity what do you have to say so i think bitcoin has basically picked a strategy on this which is they're increasingly making bitcoin using renewable energy um and it's pretty easy to figure out where bitcoin was made right so the notion that you take more or less the existing mining equipment you plug it into a renewable grid and then what comes out of that is green bitcoin it leaves some nasty questions about like but you know is that just you know like we're burning a bunch of energy now that we could have run cities on and said we're using it for bitcoin but you know bitcoin's total consumption is about the same as the city of las vegas okay globally we're racing like a las vegas worth of renewable resources on bitcoin mining and you can live with it right and the comparison here is probably coal um well called gold right gold mining is on the order of 100 million tons of carbon emissions a year bitcoins on the order of 20 million 23 million

[1:47:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=6449s) so you sort of think like if we could tolerate the gold industry we could probably tolerate bitcoin running on solar panels so i think that's how they're going to get out of the current environmental trap that they're in you'll see a lot of people getting whacked pretty hard with oh your bitcoin is dirty bitcoin that was made with coal power that's really terrible we're not touching your coins and so you'll get as a kind of soft fork where there's just an increasing stigmatization of coins that were made using dirty energy and an increasing privileging of coins that were made using clean energy and i think the american bitcoin mining that is happening now because the chinese have gotten kind of pushed out a little by their government a lot of that is coming online as a green bitcoin and you know is that as green as you could get well you know you're burning a lot of energy aggressive renewables it's not a great thing but it's good enough for bitcoin to be able to survive even in a world that is much more aggressive about um co2 emissions and green issues in general and i think they'll square the circle that way and that's how they'll get by um i think the bigger problem is it's expensive to use and the high transaction fees that we're on bitcoin and our own ethereum and that kind of stuff i think the push to get transaction fees down because people are using these currencies in the real world to make real payments for their you know rent and coffee and shoes and so on i think that is going to be the thing that really puts pressure on bitcoin and again this is where the question about the lightning network's viability comes in you know we'll sort of see what happens um yeah i mean you know you don't want to short bitcoin thank you very much vinay well i think that concludes our event we are we're out of time i'd like to once again thank our panel uh professor moriarty dr einberg thomas barker Vinay gupta thank you so much to the hub culture team who have hosted us here thanks so much to the Mattereum team who have enabled these events to run so well and so smoothly thank you andrew thank you katie thank you jeremy please come and talk to the panelists uh after the event uh we have a we have a space upstairs uh for for for doing that uh thank you again for joining us i hope we've come away we will come away with new ideas new solutions and a renewed figure to do something positive thank you

[1:49:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=6599s) [Applause] [Music] i'm glad you're here [Music]

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End of [791] COP26 Event: Green Blockchain, Green Economy, 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, [714](https://guptaoption.com/texts/714.md) Autonomous A1 - Taming Capitalism with Vinay Gupta of... (2021); the most closely related, [251](https://guptaoption.com/texts/251.md) ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change (2020); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.