# Global governance in the era of blockchain. (part 2 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [851], 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: document (Web page), 2018-03-21 (publication data), https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca. Text: document text
- 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): Global-tier governance thinking that sits around the plan rather than in it.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Copyright and the digital economy: a case for reason (2010): Short paper proposing land law, with rights of way and trespass, as a better model for copying than theft:... (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)
  - Taking a crack at a practical system (introducing the ESCROWNYM) (2012): Blog essay proposing the escrownym: an identity lodged with escrow brokers under a legally binding... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Bitcoin, libertarianism & the state (16%); Blockchain infrastructure & theory — databases, semantics, identity & trust (12%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: fiat property (5 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); global governance (7 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); democratic machinery (3 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); Holochain (2 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); GDPR (3 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); human rights (7 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); communications (8 here; 81 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 5 undated); global trade (3 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); jurisdictional arbitrage (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Dubai (3 here; 41 sources in all, earliest dated 2011, 1 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): GDPR; fiat property
- Importance: core-text score 0.26 (1.00 is the top), number 300 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [505] [The State is Not Our Master: Friendly American... (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/505.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
  - [768] [#03 - Vinay Gupta : History of Money, Foundations of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/768.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
- On the same works, just before: [653] Interview with Brett Scott - Internet of Agreements (2017); [654] Interview with Stephen Diehl - Internet of Agreements (2017); [779] [Vinay Gupta about InsurePal (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/779.md)
- On the same works, just after: [713] [Vinay Gupta on identity, starting a fund, internet court... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/713.md); [635] [Ian Grigg (Chamapesa) and Vinay Gupta (Mattereum) on... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/635.md); [632] Law and Global Trade in the Era of Blockchain (2018)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Global governance in the era of blockchain., document, 2018-03-21, https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [851], https://guptaoption.com/texts/851.md.

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[passage 14](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) be done for the law. And the best thing about this is in the same way that you could go and visit places you’ve never been on Google Maps, you could go and run experiments on the law in places that you’ve never been and in places that you might want to go. I’m an industrial shipper of goods, I want to see whether I could take this particular container of yoghurt and send it to Germany. I take my virtual yoghurt, I register it with all the systems, I ship it to Germany inside of the computer, the computer comes back and says, “Your product labelling is all wrong, you can’t do that,” I correct the product labelling, I try in the simulator again, and this time it goes through. What I think we’re heading into is a world in which there is very substantial automated access to regulation, so that we can very, very quickly use computers to figure out what particular set of rules the government wants us to play by locally, and then the computers could just figure out all of the hard stuff, and it should set us free from the vast majority of the regulatory burden, in the same way that digital mapping set us free from the vast majority of the navigational burden of going to unfamiliar places — automated compliance assistance. What I think we’re heading into is a world in which there is very substantial automated access to regulation, so that we can very, very quickly use computers to figure out what particular set of rules the government wants us to play by locally, and then the computers could just figure out all of the hard stuff, and it should set us free from the vast majority of the regulatory burden, in the same way that digital mapping set us free from the vast majority of the navigational burden of going to unfamiliar places — automated compliance assistance. Now, here’s the hard question at the bottom of this and why this is very relevant to the blockchain. Systems like this will make the automation of law extremely cheap, it’ll make it very, very easy to tell people what to do, because the software in their phone will beep and tell them that they’re going to do something wrong when they do something wrong. “Hey, you can’t do that here! — Oh, right,” and on one hand you never get a parking ticket unexpectedly, and on the other hand maybe you’ve got Big Brother in your pocket in a whole new way. What we’re going to need as we move into an age when these kinds of technologies are inevitable is a much clearer understanding of what constitutes liberty. We need to think very clearly about what are the universal standards that we think all nation states should comply with, because at the end of the day the governments of the world work for us, they’re constituted on behalf of the people

[passage 15](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) age when these kinds of technologies are inevitable is a much clearer understanding of what constitutes liberty. We need to think very clearly about what are the universal standards that we think all nation states should comply with, because at the end of the day the governments of the world work for us, they’re constituted on behalf of the people to do what they are told, and that’s why we have systems like democracy. Even in cultures which are not constituted in a democratic way, you still have the fundamental idea that the state is there to serve the people; that idea is universal, it’s almost never breached. So in this kind of modern context, because the governments are slow, because they’re kind of inept, because they fumble with the future in almost all cases... There are a few examples, like Dubai has a different attitude, Singapore, but for the vast majority of governments the future is a threat. And for us, as people that are leaning hard into the future, we have to figure out what are the fundamental rules that we expect governments to play by as they interface with us in this kind of co-creation of the future. How do we create a situation in which individual rights are used to shape the legislative agendas that will regulate how technologies are managed? How do we use the technologies themselves to document those decisions in such a way that we can transparently navigate around the high-tech environment we’re going into? Because if we don’t get these things right, what we’re going to get is automated legal enforcement which is completely incoherent as you go from jurisdiction to jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and if you yourself are not the person that owns the device that gives you this legal navigation, you’re going to be in the kind of Internet of Things hell, where every time you go outside something starts automatically sending you bills. You’ll be sent fines for things that you never even knew you did, which is the current situation that people have as drivers, but that will go from drivers to being with individuals within 5–10 years. I think the blockchain is basically a posterchild for individual, self-organised free speech being used to constitute these higher-level political structures, which it’s extremely difficult to find a civil rights case for tearing it down. You can’t really explain why free speech is not something people are allowed to do, and if somebody is clever enough to figure out how to use free speech to create currency, it’s very hard to imagine you would stop that. But it’s a test case, and you know the kind of future that we’re heading into, you know how complicated the technology will get. We have to catch up our rhetoric and our dialogue around fundamental human rights, and global fundamental human rights, very quickly, or we’re going to be left in a very uncomfortable place indeed. Thank you very much. [applause] Question :

[passage 16](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) case, and you know the kind of future that we’re heading into, you know how complicated the technology will get. We have to catch up our rhetoric and our dialogue around fundamental human rights, and global fundamental human rights, very quickly, or we’re going to be left in a very uncomfortable place indeed. Thank you very much. [applause] Question : I wanted to ask about the intersection of what you guys talked about. Because you started out talking about global systems, and then you were talking about property. But there’s things that are global systems that are things, like the oceans. So where’s the intersection between what you guys are talking about, as far as global governance of things that are global systems. Vinay : Part of the reason that we have such a problem protecting the oceans is because we have no effective global governance of the oceans, there’s no constituted body that treats the oceans as its sovereign territory. If we had a kind of single country that was all of the deep ocean, everything’s that’s outside of... All the international waters, if that was treated as if it was a nation state and had a bunch of people who are elected to represent it, you could easily imagine that that would then be able to enforce law in its sovereign territory, and you’d very quickly be able to figure out a lot of the environmental issues regarding the oceans. But because we’ve treated it as basically no mans’ land, it turns out that nobody is really taking care of it; the same thing for the atmosphere. We only really know how to regulate land. Matthew : My name is Matthew Schutte, I’m with a project called Holochain. One of the ways in which we kind of subsidise our project is by building a little app that bridges between our peer-to-peer apps and the central Web servers, we’ve got this bridging thing. I bring that up, because the question that Rob had posed early on about how will these distributed autonomous organisations interact with this world that is dependent on geography, etc., and I don’t think we’re the only ones who are going to grapple with this, to find some solution to it. But the fundamental tension there is that these distributed autonomous organisations — blockchain-based solutions, Holochain-based solutions, etc. — are really dealing with enforcement and influence of behaviour through discretion, through people choosing whether to interact with somebody else based on their history, and that’s a different model: it’s a discretion-based enforcement mechanism, and it’s different from what legal systems are based upon, which is a violence-based enforcement mechanism and is dependent on the presence of a body. So one of the things that we’re dealing with, and I’m sure others will as well, is you actually need, if you want to operate in a particular jurisdiction and make use of the enforcement mechanisms and the guarantees and the banking system, etc. that operates there, you

[passage 17](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) violence-based enforcement mechanism and is dependent on the presence of a body. So one of the things that we’re dealing with, and I’m sure others will as well, is you actually need, if you want to operate in a particular jurisdiction and make use of the enforcement mechanisms and the guarantees and the banking system, etc. that operates there, you have to show up according to those rules, you have to have some bodies that you put at risk. Then you start to get into how do we set up the relationships between those bodies and this distributed organisation, and it’s very different scenario mechanisms. There’s a whole bunch of design decisions that get in between those, but it really boils down to this tension between two different mechanisms of enforcement. Vinay : Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s all jurisdictional arbitrage, isn’t it? You have a single business process that has an element that runs on the blockchain world, an element that runs in the physical world, and different parts of the process are done in different jurisdictions. Matthew : And at some level this stuff isn’t new, right? Multinational corporations have been doing this “We’ll put a body here, we’ll put a body there...” This game is not a new game, but it’s being played with a different set of decision making processes on the other stuff. Vinay : Yeah, yeah. You have a saying, the thing about nerds and securities law... Rob : Oh, yes. I remember seeing this comment somewhere on Twitter or social media somewhere, saying the real purpose of the blockchain and cryptocurrencies and ICOs is to teach nerds how securities law works. And I think this was intended, that these nerds are going to get a rude awakening one day and they’re going to learn how the law really works, it’s going to show them who’s boss. But I kind of think there’s an unintended consequence, which is the outcome of this is a bunch of nerds who know how securities law works, and that sounds pretty dangerous. [laughter] Question : Just a general question of how blockchain might affect the role of governments and nation states, and maybe the geopolitical consequences of blockchain. Vinay : Oh, let’s just do it. How many nation states do you think there are? Question : 60? Vinay : 15. If you don’t have a nuclear bomb, you’re not a nation state. [laughter] It’s very simple: these things are provinces, they’re not countries. By the way, Germany and Japan and a few other places are considered to have what they refer to screwdriver-ready nuclear weapons: you don’t have any nukes, 15 seconds after the Russians being to make serious noise, they’re like “Look what we’ve found in this factory!” Once you understand that there are only really 15 countries in the world and the rest is provinces, most of international relations becomes very, very easy to understand. You just look at the nuclear arsenal, and you look at

[passage 18](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) any nukes, 15 seconds after the Russians being to make serious noise, they’re like “Look what we’ve found in this factory!” Once you understand that there are only really 15 countries in the world and the rest is provinces, most of international relations becomes very, very easy to understand. You just look at the nuclear arsenal, and you look at the position of the nuclear arsenal relative to the other nuclear arsenal, and the global political game becomes extremely simple. The Americans do design and finance, the Chinese do manufacturing, the Russians do energy, the Europeans just kind of screw around with agriculture and stuff... [laughter] You could tell what each nuclear block does, and then you’ve got the areas that have nuclear actor, like South America and Africa, and these places are generally terrible, because nobody is in charge. Once you get an accurate model of how this stuff works, you then note that the nuclear state actors are completely outside of the democratic framework. You don’t get to vote on who actually makes the decisions about that stuff, are you crazy? The US National Security Council maintained the policy of containment for 40 years regardless of who was in power, without taking any regard of the democratic institutions at all — the national security guys have figured out how to solve the problem. Against that background, I think there’s enormous hope for individual liberty, because the real powers inside of government don’t care about social policy; they’re super busy watching the other peers in the big power game, they don’t care about social policy at all. I think if we got real about that, that the real powers in government don’t care about social policy, we could get much clearer about where the demarcation line is between the individual and the state. The state is the thing that maintains the nuclear weapons stockpile, and everything else is just a series of interlocking mayors: they’re responsible for cleaning the streets, they’re responsible for making sure that there are schools open, but other than that they don’t really care what people do. It’s this slipping away of realism in the way that we relate to the state since the invention of the nuclear bomb that I think leads to this enormously futile political thrashing which is the vast majority of our political activity. The real state doesn’t really care, and we should take advantage of that and renegotiate, and stop paying so much attention to the fake state apparatus which is the machinery of democracy. That’s not where the power is, don’t be ridiculous. Does that make sense? We can largely renegotiate, because those guys are completely hollowed out compared to where they used to be. That’s my analysis. Do you have anything to add to that? Rob : No. [laughter] Question : As you were saying, all of the issues that have come up recently are just a by-product of the way that our political system has been set

[passage 19](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) largely renegotiate, because those guys are completely hollowed out compared to where they used to be. That’s my analysis. Do you have anything to add to that? Rob : No. [laughter] Question : As you were saying, all of the issues that have come up recently are just a by-product of the way that our political system has been set up. By establishing something that’s as controversial as social policy being managed by blockchains, how do you envision that governments will change in the future? Rob : There’s a few different ways that people have tried to approach this. I’ve seen a bunch of different projects that have gone on in the past to create digital democracy, digital engagement with democracy. The UK actually has a particularly good voluntary community, organisations like mySociety, which basically saw that the government wasn’t doing anything to build digital tools to help citizenry engage with the government, and just went out and built them themselves. That kind of work is really good as far as it goes, that’s definitely led to greater accountability for Members of Parliament... But has it really changed the political culture. I don’t think it has. What we’ve seen in the recent US elections is claims that in fact the Internet has in some ways at least shifted where the power is coming from, because we now have these systems of mass influence through digital channels that enable non-state actors or external state actors to influence people’s opinions and to control public opinion in that way. So I think the first thing we need to figure out is do the people, does the democratic polity have the right tools at its disposal to express what it really wants to our political class? Right now I’d say it’s not clear that we do. We have a system based on voting, which is very much a quantitative system. We measure political success by things like opinion polls, by things like general election results. We were hearing earlier today about systems like Futaki or other proposed alternative government systems that focus much more on whether or not a particular policy is effective, so we separate the question out of what do we want from what’s the most effective way of getting it. That might be a way of re-slicing things so that we get a more realistic set of levers that we can pull on to get what we want. But I think one of the things that we haven’t really done yet, and the blockchain and more open systems for moving around money and moving around value might give us this, is much more fine-grained measurements of how people’s lives are actually going. Over the last 10 years average wages in the UK have not risen, the average person is poorer than they were 10 years ago. That should be the top item on the political agenda, and nobody ever talks about it, the average person’s life is not getting any better.

[passage 20](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) much more fine-grained measurements of how people’s lives are actually going. Over the last 10 years average wages in the UK have not risen, the average person is poorer than they were 10 years ago. That should be the top item on the political agenda, and nobody ever talks about it, the average person’s life is not getting any better. The government: you had one job, which is make people’s lives better, and you have not managed to do it for 10 years. Where are the alarm bells going off in central government about this fact? They don’t appear to be there. So I think what we might see out of new tools for coordination is essentially the ability for the people to issue these kind of conditional ultimatums to government, to say, “You need to reduce these things according to these measures, or we will withdraw our support from you and we will move our support over here.” We might get much more fine-grained decision making tools than we currently have, which is every few years we do this voting thing, and then you get these talking head political experts turn up on the news to try and explain what it was that people actually voted for. The classic line is the people have spoken, but nobody knows what it was that they said. The last UK general election produced no overall majority for any particular political party, it’s really not obvious what the British public was trying to say, other than “We’re not happy and we don’t know what to do about it.” So it might be possible that we get, by better modelling conditionality, by better modelling what it is that people really want, and the difference between values that people would like to see implemented and beliefs about the correct form of policy... If we can separate those things out and represent them in a much more fine-grained way, we might get better democratic tools. That’s a reasonably optimistic take on the possibility for innovation, but I’m going to at least try and be optimistic and suggest that there’s a way forward. Vinay : I think this is a context thing. We should have updated the machinery of democracy every time we had an opportunity. It should have been updated a little bit with railway, it should have been updated a little bit with telegraph, it should have been updated a little bit with radio, it should have been updated a little bit with television... There was a possibility of just little updates in the democratic machinery, but now we’ve got some multi-hundred-year backlog of technological change just in the democratic machinery. If you don’t change the democratic intention at all and you just update the machinery, I think we would get vastly better societies. But how do you take the risk, how do you do the experiment? Maybe we should foist it on Scotland. Question : Moving away from voting and back to justice, as

[passage 21](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) change just in the democratic machinery. If you don’t change the democratic intention at all and you just update the machinery, I think we would get vastly better societies. But how do you take the risk, how do you do the experiment? Maybe we should foist it on Scotland. Question : Moving away from voting and back to justice, as you guys started, is there another danger with the Internet generation and as people are interacting at distances well beyond their local communities in ways that previously they would have interacted only with peers in their local communities, that a lot of stuff that used to be enforced in a more social way now needs to be enforced in another way, and our legal institutions are not designed to deal with that? The most obvious crimes nowadays are trolling and piracy, but I think the institutions may not be cheap enough to deal with the scale of those breaches in the social contract. So I think that goes beyond the model that you’re talking about, of automating something which is then enforced by courts; if it’s too expensive to enforce a minor infraction to the courts, but actually the sum total of those minor infractions is major social evil. What do you do with that? Rob : I’ve got one thought on this. I think we are starting to see that certainly social media is a major force for exerting social pressure on individuals. If you say the wrong thing to the wrong person, it’s not just one person who is going to be annoyed at you; it’s going to be the entire world who can witness that conversation and then pile in, and that could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on which side of the argument you’re on. Obviously you can see sometimes it’s somebody that you think has said something very inappropriate or obnoxious, and they’re getting their rightful condemnation; other times you might see this is a hate mob being set after an individual who has made a perfectly reasonable statement and is being prevented from speaking out and speaking the truth. Vinay : Often both at the same time. Rob : It really does depend on your perspective. Everyone is a liberal when they think their speech is under threat, and everyone is an authoritarian when they think they can crush the other side. It took me a long time to figure that out, but it is unfortunately true. So, I’d be vary of making enforcement mechanisms that can be triggered too easily, simply because the first... It’s often justified on the basis that we need to protect the weak from the strong, so we’re going to have an authority and that authority is going to have an enforcement mechanism, but it often tends to be the case that the strong then have better access to the enforcement mechanism than the weak do. Twitter has had this whole problem with trying to

[passage 22](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) basis that we need to protect the weak from the strong, so we’re going to have an authority and that authority is going to have an enforcement mechanism, but it often tends to be the case that the strong then have better access to the enforcement mechanism than the weak do. Twitter has had this whole problem with trying to create a mechanism whereby they can punish people for making threats or for making inappropriate statements, but the power of that system basically goes to whoever can organise the most people to report someone else’s content that isn’t appropriate. So an organised trolling group can very easily go around and report a bunch of other people’s content, and it often ends up being the case that the people that I think in a rational world would be seen as more sinned against than sinners tend to be the ones who are getting shut down, and you can often have to me very inappropriate things that go completely unpunished. So I would say... My answer to that is kind of terrible, which is wait and see. I don’t think we’ve had long enough to internalise the cultural impact of this stuff. There’s a sort of old thing which I just don’t quite remember, but the age of newsgroups and stuff like this in the late 80s, early 90s, there was this idea of acculturation. People would come in, they’d kind of be assholes to each other, and then they kind of get taught that you don’t do that kind of thing around here, it’s not right. Then in basically September, 1993 the Internet underwent this phase shift as AOL subscriptions became a main thing, and instead of it being every year a new bunch of students get access to the Internet at university and they go through this kind of acculturation process, and by the time the next batch of students come in the first batch have kind of been taught how to behave properly, with AOL began this rolling wave of huge numbers of new users coming onto the Internet, and civil discourse on online discussion forums completely broke down and has never been recovered. It’s referred to as the Eternal September: we’re basically in this period of so many people and so little cultural authority that we can’t use social pressure to teach people how to behave properly, and this is why people are now trying to get Facebook to do it or Twitter to do it as a kind of big stick authoritarian power. Vinay : Yeah. Rob : Hopefully, over time the Internet will become a normal part of everyday life, that we develop the social mechanisms that teach people that actually saying that kind of thing is deeply inappropriate and wrong and you shouldn’t do it. But we just haven’t found the right balance between authoritarian power and social pressure that makes that work correctly. Vinay : There are lots of experiments. The Chinese Sesame Credit

[passage 23](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) part of everyday life, that we develop the social mechanisms that teach people that actually saying that kind of thing is deeply inappropriate and wrong and you shouldn’t do it. But we just haven’t found the right balance between authoritarian power and social pressure that makes that work correctly. Vinay : There are lots of experiments. The Chinese Sesame Credit system begins to look like real social consequences for bad behaviour online; it just happens to be a little closer to the authoritarian end of that landscape. When the Americans get around to doing it, they’ll do it with AI. You’ll have some really effective Nazi detection algorithm, and then you’ll just basically censor people with AIs, but then the question is always once you’ve got an incredibly cheap robot watchman, the tendency will be to extend the reach more and more and more. Very, very tricky territory, very, very tricky. Automated law enforcement is going to be the big danger in the 21st century. Question : Thank you so much for your really interesting and clear discussion of the tension between new technologies and existing governance structures, particularly framed by geography. I would like to hear your thoughts on the tension between the upcoming EU GDPR framework, and the public blockchain. Vinay : Yeah, it’s going to be a car crash. I mean, it’s just what do you do? It’s just two completely different paradigms of understanding of what computers are or how they work. The blockchain does have this property that if you post somebody’s personal information there it’s there for keeps, and GDPR does make that very, very illegal. Rob : We’ve had that kind of problem before, specifically in relation to newspapers. If a newspaper publishes a story about you that turns out to be incorrect, in certain jurisdictions you have the ability to sue them, but the normal, first option is to ask for a correction to appear in a newspaper. Generally speaking, you pick up any newspaper on any given day, and there will be some small section somewhere marked “corrections” and it will say that in this story, published on this date, where we said that these things happened, they in fact did not happen. Vinay : “We did not mean to imply that this person ate their own dog.” Rob : Yes. That’s not a perfect solution, but the idea that you publish something that’s incorrect and then publish a correction after the fact is one way of looking at things, and this is kind of similar to how for instance your bank works, if your bank charges you for something because they say you went overdrawn and in fact you didn’t... They charge you a £10 fee, you call up the bank, they admit the mistake and they credit you with £10 back again to make it okay. They never go back in time and remove the wrong transaction; they make a compensating transaction after the fact to make things okay

[passage 24](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) they say you went overdrawn and in fact you didn’t... They charge you a £10 fee, you call up the bank, they admit the mistake and they credit you with £10 back again to make it okay. They never go back in time and remove the wrong transaction; they make a compensating transaction after the fact to make things okay again. The newspaper correction is a similar thing: they do something wrong, and then they make a compensating action to correct the thing that they did wrong. So I think there’s a kind of sliding scale of things, where, in my view, an incorrect financial transaction, as long as it’s corrected after the fact, expunged from my credit record or whatever it might be is basically fine. If my name gets published on the sex offenders register, someone publishing another record later saying, “Oh no, it was a different guy with a similar name,” I would be less inclined to believe that that’s an acceptable fix for that problem, because someone is always going to be able to find that, and there’s always going to be that question of “He was on there, then he got removed and we’re not really sure why.” GDPR is at one end of the spectrum on this. I personally find it really hard to imagine how we’re going to enforce this, and I think it’s going to be really, really interesting to see how it works. It’s possible that we get somewhere with different kinds of encryption technology that enable us to expunge records from blockchains once they’ve been put on there... As a sort of purist software architect, that kind of horrifies me, the idea of going back and rewriting history, it breaks the integrity of the system, but making those kinds of compromises might be necessary. I don’t buy the argument which says it simply can’t be done. It is an engineering job and someone will figure out how to do it. It is a classic example of if you really wanted to rigorously enforce that, rigorously enforce it, you would need to be inspecting data as it leaves the EU to see if it contains anybody’s personal information, you’d need to have a digital border and you’d need to be able to inspect all the traffic that’s going over. That’s clearly incompatible with the way that we actually do things, it’s probably incompatible with privacy... Vinay : And this is going to keep happening, this kind of head-on crash between perfectly sensible-looking law and a new technology is going to be more and more and more how government works. Over and over again you’re going to see new technologies, they won’t work properly with the old law, you’ll make new law to regulate them, and the law will be incoherent... We’re going through a very, very hard time for lawmakers, because they’re just constantly trying to manage a situation that’s changing faster than they can adapt. Host : On that note,

[passage 25](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) over again you’re going to see new technologies, they won’t work properly with the old law, you’ll make new law to regulate them, and the law will be incoherent... We’re going through a very, very hard time for lawmakers, because they’re just constantly trying to manage a situation that’s changing faster than they can adapt. Host : On that note, I think we’re all very grateful to have Vinay and Rob close the day today with such a thought-provoking speech, so if we could just thank them again. [applause] _______________________________ Learn more about our project Mattereum https://mattereum.com/ Join the conversation in our telegram chat . ______

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End of [851] Global governance in the era of blockchain., 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, [713](https://guptaoption.com/texts/713.md) Vinay Gupta on identity, starting a fund, internet court... (2018); the most closely related, [505](https://guptaoption.com/texts/505.md) The State is Not Our Master: Friendly American... (2025); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.