# Global governance in the era of blockchain. (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [851], part 1 of 2. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: 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 1 of 2
[passage 1](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) Mar 21, 2018 Global governance in the era of blockchain. On February 24th Vinay Gupta and I held a talk at the conference “Blockchain: Rewiring Governance” in Cambridge. Below you can find the video and the transcript of this talk. We were talking about problems and possibilities for global governance in the era of blockchain, raising questions like: How will blockchain affect the way we globally do business? How do we apply rules and regulations to this space, when it was built without any of the affordances you need to put the existing national rules and regulations in place? How is the technology changing the way we understand and deal with our individual rights? And how do we rethink and use individual rights to shape the legislative agendas that will regulate how new technologies are managed? Video: Transcript: Rob : I want to try and look a little bit at blockchain governance from a historical perspective. I’m trying to introduce some long-range, 40–45 year thinking here, where we can look back on the blockchain in the context of the development of the Internet. We’ve had something that resembles an Internet for about 45 years at this point. The first iteration of the Internet, if you want to call it that, probably begins in about 1973, and it begins with a group of universities in the US linking their computer networks up to each other. The primary drivers for this thing are for the sharing of information amongst scientists, academics and researchers, and for the defence establishment to have a secure and robust communications infrastructure that is decentralised and resistant to, for instance, nuclear attack on a communications HQ. The defence people are mostly interested in having the infrastructure there, but they don’t actually have that much day-to-day use for it most of the time, so by default the system belongs to the scientists, it belongs to the academics, it belongs to the researchers. They do the kind of things that those people want to do, which is they want to share research information with each other, they want to keep in touch, they want something to replace having to send letters to each other, or having to send paper reports, or having to publish all of their results quarterly in journals. With email they can share those results immediately, and with FTP or other file transfer systems they can send large datasets to each other pretty much as quickly as the communications lines will carry them. We have this first era of the Internet that runs for about 15–20 years and is primarily an Internet of ideas ; it’s non-commercial, and it’s really just there to help people communicate with each other, and pretty much the last act of that kind of first age of the Internet was the creation of the Worldwide Web. This was a product of the scientific establishment, it was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN research institute, and his original thinking was “This is

[passage 2](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) and it’s really just there to help people communicate with each other, and pretty much the last act of that kind of first age of the Internet was the creation of the Worldwide Web. This was a product of the scientific establishment, it was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN research institute, and his original thinking was “This is going to be a great way for me to share my findings and my research with other scientists, and maybe they will want to share their findings and research in the same way too.” This isn’t how it’s done now. The Worldwide Web was the first thing that was actually easy enough for ordinary people to use, and even inside CERN people were using it for all kinds of stuff that was completely unrelated to their day job. I think one of the first examples of this was that a group of female scientists at CERN had formed their own music group, and they created a webpage to talk about their songs and to share that with other people. So pretty quickly the Web began this process of bringing more personal information, bringing more personal discussion and bringing the sharing of media onto the Internet. Go forward another couple of years, and people realise that this might be really useful for commercial purposes. The same things you can do on the Web kind of look a lot like catalogue shopping: you can browse around and you look at things, you’ve got pictures of stuff... If there was only some way that you could actually place the order, then you could complete the entire purchase process using the Internet. Unfortunately, there’s no secure way of sending payments over the Internet at this point so we can’t do it. Enter some cryptography researchers, you have a good way of encrypting information over the Internet, this gets formalised as the Secure Sockets Layer standard, or HTTPS, and this gives us the ability to send payment information. We can take our credit card numbers and send them securely across the Internet to other people. We then get the second great age of the Internet, which is variously you might call it the Internet of payments or an Internet of commerce or an Internet of shopping, which is all about taking the things that we can do with our credit cards and putting them on the Internet. Amazon is basically just a giant supermarket, and Netflix is basically just a giant video rental store, and Uber is basically just a giant taxi service, but we’ve taken those things from the physical world and moved them into the digital world, all on the back of being able to send our credit card information securely over the Internet. I really want to emphasise how simple that innovation is; just being able to send credit card information securely over the Internet gives us Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, eBay, Netflix, and it also in a way gives us Google and

[passage 3](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) into the digital world, all on the back of being able to send our credit card information securely over the Internet. I really want to emphasise how simple that innovation is; just being able to send credit card information securely over the Internet gives us Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, eBay, Netflix, and it also in a way gives us Google and Facebook, because the business models of Uber and Facebook are dependent on advertising to people who have credit cards and can put their credit card numbers in and then buy something from somebody. This gives you several of the world’s largest companies by market cap at this moment in time. The entire e-commerce revolution, the entire last 20 years of Web and mobile app development is all based off this ability to send credit card information. And it works because the technology has the same kind of basic form as the shopping experience: you go into a store, you kind of browse around, you see something you like, you pick it up, you put it in a shopping basket, you take it to the checkout, you’re then processed through the checkout, and, congratulations, you now own a pair of jeans that you didn’t own before, and you’ve paid for it using cash or credit card. The Web is very, very good at modelling that kind of experience: you click through various different pages, you see a product you like, you add it to your shopping cart, you click “checkout”, you enter your payment information, and, congratulations, you’ve now bought something. That fit between the technology and the experience created the explosive growth of ecommerce, that was why it was so easy to do it, that is why it rolled out so quickly and why it was so effective. But it also leaves a bunch of stuff that hasn’t been done: we don’t yet really have a good digital representation of something like an insurance contract. Because you sign an insurance contract, and many months or years later you then come back to make a claim on the insurance, and the Web isn’t such a good fit for that, because things that get put on the Web tend not to stay there. If you go back 10 years and write down the top most popular webpages in the world from 10–20 years ago, a good number of them aren’t there anymore. A contract that disappears is not very useful; a product that disappears from the supermarket shelves, that’s kind of expected, you kind of know that the products that are there now... This year’s spring and summer collection is not going to be there next year, but this year’s insurance contracts damn well better be there next year when you want to make a claim on it. So we have this space of personal finance, business finance, things that run on for instance 90-day invoices, that need to last quite a long time and that need to have clear identities of

[passage 4](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) to be there next year, but this year’s insurance contracts damn well better be there next year when you want to make a claim on it. So we have this space of personal finance, business finance, things that run on for instance 90-day invoices, that need to last quite a long time and that need to have clear identities of the participants, so they are multiparty participant-based. They might be conditional, they might have logic built in — the insurance pay-out will only happen if these conditions have been met, the invoice will only be paid if these conditions have been met — and they need to last for a really long time. In a way that the Web is a good fit for the shopping experience, do we have a technology now that’s a good fit for these other experiences? Our position is that the blockchain is a good fit for those kinds of experiences. You can sign something with your digital signature and your counterparty signs it with their digital signature, you can specify the logic of conditionality in a smart contract, and once you put it on the blockchain it stays there. So it’s a super useful way of doing all kinds of contractual agreements, where you have a proper, full digital representation of that contract, in the same way that an ecommerce store gives you a proper, full digital representation of basically the catalogue shopping experience. In a way that the Web is a good fit for the shopping experience, do we have a technology now that’s a good fit for these other experiences? Our position is that the blockchain is a good fit for those kinds of experiences. You can sign something with your digital signature and your counterparty signs it with their digital signature, you can specify the logic of conditionality in a smart contract, and once you put it on the blockchain it stays there. So it’s a super useful way of doing all kinds of contractual agreements, where you have a proper, full digital representation of that contract, in the same way that an ecommerce store gives you a proper, full digital representation of basically the catalogue shopping experience. Our thinking in all of this is that there’s a long sweep of technical innovation going on, where problems get solved once the technology becomes available to solve them. The Web unlocked a bunch of stuff that just wasn’t possible before the Web was invented, and the blockchain has unlocked a bunch of stuff that wasn’t possible before the blockchain was invented. So the reason why people are getting really excited about the blockchain, the reason why so much money and so much hype and so much buzz is going on is because it has opened up a new space, and that new space may well be bigger than e-commerce was, so bigger than the thing that gave us Amazon, Netflix, Google, Uber, Airbnb, etc. It might actually be the thing that in

[passage 5](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) blockchain, the reason why so much money and so much hype and so much buzz is going on is because it has opened up a new space, and that new space may well be bigger than e-commerce was, so bigger than the thing that gave us Amazon, Netflix, Google, Uber, Airbnb, etc. It might actually be the thing that in 20 years’ time you look back on, we see the world’s five most valuable companies were companies that were born out of the blockchain revolution, in the same way that several of the world’s most valuable companies right now were born out of the e-commerce revolution. The interesting thing that’s changed, and I think where this gives us a governance challenge, is that the blockchain is also kind of world’s first major post-Internet digital technology. What I mean by that is that you need to think about the ages and the psychology of the people involved in creating a lot of this technology. There is a famous quote by Douglas Adams which I don’t trust myself to remember, so I’m going to read it out from my phone. Douglas Adams said: “I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that is invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything that is invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.” “I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that is invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything that is invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.” [laughter] This worked pretty well: I’m 36 now, so basically anything that comes after this point is just wrong, but that kind of matches my experience pretty well. Google was invented in 1998, when I was 17, and to me that was a very, very clear signal that this is where I’m going to build my career, and I built my early career as a software engineer building Web systems, because it was obviously the way the world was going. One of the things that happens though as you get older is you realise that the people in their early 20s are getting further and further away from you. If I look at Vitalik Buterin for instance, who created Ethereum, he’s 24, he was born in 1994, he was four years old when Google was founded. So for him, the Internet and global, very, very low cost, always-on communications is just a natural

[passage 6](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) realise that the people in their early 20s are getting further and further away from you. If I look at Vitalik Buterin for instance, who created Ethereum, he’s 24, he was born in 1994, he was four years old when Google was founded. So for him, the Internet and global, very, very low cost, always-on communications is just a natural part of how the world works, it’s always been there. For people pretty much under the age of 30, the Internet has always been there: Facebook has always been there, Google has always been there, Amazon has always been there; it’s kind of like the post office or the phone company or something, they’ve always existed. And they’ve always been global: they made friends with people they’re playing videogames with on the other side of the world, they’re used to being able to communicate through social media with anybody and everybody, and national borders really don’t figure in that. So when we were starting to roll out the Internet in the late ’80s and early ’90s and we wanted to figure out how we were going to identify all of these computers on the Internet — we couldn’t just use the IP addresses, they’re very, very hard to remember — we need to give them names, and we need to have a hierarchical system of naming servers on the Internet, and we created the Domain Name System. The Domain Name System has a whole bunch of top level domains — .com, .edu and so on and so forth — but the majority of these names are country codes — .co.uk, .fr, .de and so on and so forth — which identifies a website as having a scope that’s, broadly speaking, limited to a particular country. The blockchain doesn’t have any of that, because the people who built the blockchain grew up in a world in which global communication was normal rather than the exception. Global communication is not some exciting, new, whizzy thing that’s never been seen before; global communication is how the world works. So when they set out to build a system of money, it doesn’t occur to them to think, “We’re going to have a British system of money for this area, a separate French system and a separate German system, a separate system for China... We’re going to have one system, and it’s going to work in pretty much exactly the same anywhere in the world.” So when Bitcoin comes along, it’s just global by default. Nobody thinks, it doesn’t even occur to anybody that you should limit it on a country by country basis, that idea is just not something that anybody would ever think. That’s what gives us this really interesting governance problem when people start to build really interesting things on top of blockchains, decentralised, autonomous organisations. What jurisdiction is that organisation in? I don’t know. Does anybody really have a good answer to that? Probably not. What jurisdiction is a record on

[passage 7](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) idea is just not something that anybody would ever think. That’s what gives us this really interesting governance problem when people start to build really interesting things on top of blockchains, decentralised, autonomous organisations. What jurisdiction is that organisation in? I don’t know. Does anybody really have a good answer to that? Probably not. What jurisdiction is a record on the blockchain held in? Which data protection regulations apply to the information on the blockchain? If people are doing initial coin offerings or token sales, whatever you want to call them, which countries’ financial investment and securities regulations apply to those token sales? There isn’t an obvious answer, because the assumptions of the people who built the underlying system were so at odds with the existing national regulatory frameworks that the things just don’t play very nicely together. So any response of legal governance is going to have to be one that takes into account the fact that in an Internet native world, national governance and global communications are kind of an odd fit. We need some way of maybe... Either we balkanise the Internet and have separate national Internets with national governance, or we figure out some way of doing international governance that people are happy with, and international governance right now is pretty hard to do. The great wave of Post-World War II international institution building has kind of stopped. Brexit would be a good example, but there are other examples now, of it becoming harder and harder to get international cooperation on certain kinds of issues. So we’re faced with this real, genuine conundrum: how do we apply rules and regulations to a space that was built without any of the affordances you need to put the existing national rules and regulations in place? Our view is that honestly we don’t know how that is going to end. As Mattereum, as a company, we believe in contracts and self-regulation, the idea that people make agreements amongst themselves, and use existing enforcement mechanisms to tie those into the national, existing legal systems. But when it comes to the really big questions of what’s allowed on the blockchain, what would be considered a criminal offence on a blockchain, even that is kind of above our paygrade. And those are the kind of sets of questions that I don’t think I’ve heard anybody give a really good answer to, so I’m kind of posing this more as a question that needs an answer than something that I’ve got a good answer to. I’ve done a bunch of talks to different kinds of audiences, some very heavily student oriented, some more business oriented, and you get different generations of people. Some people will come up to me after the talk and say, “You know, this reminds me very much of a situation we had in 1987, with a new financial product that came along and we needed to figure out how to govern that.” Other people come along, who are younger,

[passage 8](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) business oriented, and you get different generations of people. Some people will come up to me after the talk and say, “You know, this reminds me very much of a situation we had in 1987, with a new financial product that came along and we needed to figure out how to govern that.” Other people come along, who are younger, with a different perspective, which is that they don’t see why some of these things should be a problem. They’re more coming in with the perspective that this is just how the Internet works, surely it’s the responsibility of the governments to get with the programme and understand how the Internet works. I think that culture clash, that set of problems to be resolved, that set of thinking that needs to be done is really just starting to happen now. I think people are only just starting to wake up to the fact that there’s a question that needs to be answered. Looking around this room, we’ve got a good mix of people of various different ages, but I think for the younger people in the audience, grappling with these kinds of questions is probably going to be a big thing that you’re going to see as a political question, as a business question, as an academic question over the next 20 years. So in many respects, I think it’s kind of up to you guys to figure out what the answer is, because I certainly don’t know. But I think if we can... Does this generally makes sense to everyone as a framing of the question? If we take that forward, we now need to think very much more about how do we do global governance of major global public infrastructure. The blockchain doesn’t belong the Western Europe, it doesn’t belong to North America, it doesn’t belong to China, it doesn’t belong to India; it kind of belongs to the world, and we need to figure out how we’re going to do global governance of these kinds of systems. That’s basically my piece, the framing thing, and I’ll hand it over to Vinay now, but I think that’s a question that I’d really like to hear everybody’s thoughts on. Maybe not immediately, but if you have thoughts on this over time, if you write about it, think about it, talk about it publicly, please do let me know what you think, I’d really love to hear what everybody makes of that. Vinay : Because we’re not going to solve this stuff today. The long-haul questions about how we do this kind of global governance, these questions are going to be with us for a while. I’m going to take a slightly different tack. I’m going to talk about individual rights . The blockchain is a system which, at least in theory, is constituted by individual actors from their right to free speech . The blockchain records a series of utterances, these are statements, and those statements carry with them

[passage 9](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) be with us for a while. I’m going to take a slightly different tack. I’m going to talk about individual rights . The blockchain is a system which, at least in theory, is constituted by individual actors from their right to free speech . The blockchain records a series of utterances, these are statements, and those statements carry with them a digital signature, the statement with a digital signature is taken as being an indicator of somebody’s free action, their free will, and as a result it’s very hard to argue that the blockchain should be illegal. A series of statements are made by individuals, those statements are interpreted by other individuals to authorise the transfer of value, and the value only exists because individuals have chosen to recognise it as having value. It’s very hard to imagine a regime in which you can stop something like that, without fundamentally limiting speech. “You can have all the speech you like, but if your speech is interpreted by other people as being a transfer of value, I’m very sorry, you’re going to have to pay taxes on that.” This is very typical of what happens when archaic framings of rights are carried into an age with new technology. You see this in America, where we have an enormous amount of drama around gun control right now, because at the point where the equilibrium is set between individuals and the state and the guns are handed out, the guns are not particularly effective at killing people. They fire roughly once every 45 seconds, they don’t have any kind of large magazine, there’s no repeating function, you have to take the thing to pieces before you could get another shot off, so they are dangerous, but they’re not that dangerous; one individual with a gun is not a global menace. 200 years later you have large calibre, large magazine assault rifles, and the balance of power that was envisaged by the American Founding Fathers has now shifted dramatically towards the individual. However, again if you look at free speech, the balance of power in free speech matters has shifted dramatically towards the state because of the enormous automated surveillance platforms that we’ve seen revealed by people like Edward Snowden. So the machinery which is used to actually carry out your rights changes over time. The right may be the same, the individual is largely unchanged, human beings have not changed very much a really long time, but the machinery that’s used to practically implement the right changes over time, and as a result, for the foreseeable future, we’re going to be in a position where there is a constant struggle over the interpretation and reinterpretation of basic human rights, as technology either strips those rights or reinforces those rights. And because electronic communications are a fantastic mechanism for speech, speech rights are the most heavily affected initial rights in these kinds of systems. The second class of rights that I think are going

[passage 10](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) position where there is a constant struggle over the interpretation and reinterpretation of basic human rights, as technology either strips those rights or reinforces those rights. And because electronic communications are a fantastic mechanism for speech, speech rights are the most heavily affected initial rights in these kinds of systems. The second class of rights that I think are going to come up in a big way are rights to property . The objects around us are casually thought of as being property. We look at this stuff, and we don’t really think very much about the system of machines that turns the physical stuff around us into somebody’s property, but actually property is a really sophisticated, complicated legal process. Does everybody know the word “fiat”? Only a few people. Fiat basically means “This is so because we have willed that it is so,” and this is typically a will which is done by a sovereign, it’s something that is done by the crown. So fiat money is money which is willed into existence by the government, and that’s all of the common forms of currency, with the exception of cryptocurrencies. Fiat property is not a term that’s used very heavily, but it refers to property which exists by government fiat. A good example of fiat property is patent. There is no immediately obvious natural right to patent, there’s no immediately obvious natural right to copyright, patent and copyright are new forms of property, they only go back a few hundred years. The ancient world doesn’t have anything that resembles copyright or patent. A trademark is another kind of fiat property, and the current system of land rights that you see in Europe is balkanised: the Germans have one model, the Dutch have a different model, the Brits have a different model, and if you go to America there are different models. All of these land rights are relatively arbitrary. Exactly how you implement the individual right of a human being to own land varies from place to place, and a lot of the conflicts that you saw between Native Americans and European colonists were because the Europeans brought with them this idea that land was divided up into partials and owned, but the Native Americans in many regions had a system of harvest, where the buffalo would come through, you take whatever you thought you were entitled to, but the land itself was not understood as having value. Because the land was not actually something that produced a lot of value, it was very hard to do any kind of farming, this was not suitable for agriculture without technology, so all you could really do was harvest what nature gave you as it went by on the hoof. We’re in an age now where the global interconnectedness of speech is more or less total. You can say something and it’s heard around the world immediately, we’re going to record this little video here, that thing could well be on

[passage 11](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) so all you could really do was harvest what nature gave you as it went by on the hoof. We’re in an age now where the global interconnectedness of speech is more or less total. You can say something and it’s heard around the world immediately, we’re going to record this little video here, that thing could well be on YouTube 15 minutes after we finish the talk. We have an environment where global speech and global free speech is achieved, at the cost of pervasive global monitoring of that speech, and you can argue that this has become something of a balance. The individual is more empowered by the global network, so is the state, and these things may or may not be seen as being in some kind of equitable balance. You could then tip that very radically if you saw mass adoption of surveillance-resistant privacy technologies, you could imagine a very sudden shift of the free speech equilibrium towards the individual. The state may be concerned, the state may also decide it just doesn’t matter that much; you’d have to see what the social impacts were. The next round of negotiation that we see is a negotiation over the globalised nature of fiat property. Right now, if I take an object from the UK to Germany, the ruling law that governs that object goes from being British law to German law, and an object which may be perfectly legal for me to own here, in Germany suddenly becomes illegal. You see this very strongly with drug policy. People are increasingly getting caught flying out of California with a marihuana cigarette in their pocket, because where they come from it’s just a cigarette, and they arrive someplace like Dubai and now they have a real problem. The object has been mysteriously transubstantiated from being kind of inoffensive to being horrendous, lethal and life-destroying, because the property has been taken from one jurisdiction to another. Now, for individuals this is occasionally a little dangerous and kind of aggravating, but for businesses this stuff is hugely problematic. If you’re something like a supplier of industrial chemicals, you have no idea whether the stuff that you’re going to ship will be legal in the jurisdiction it’s going to arrive in. You can do your legal research and you can make some phone calls and you could check what the government calls it, but the fact is that these systems are extremely complicated. Everybody gives the chemicals different names, the law may be updated infrequently, and you’re not going to get a notice telling you the law has changed, so you wind up in a position where people just repeat the same behaviour that they always have done before, and it was always okay so it should be okay now, or they deal largely with local suppliers, because the local suppliers are likely to be in the same jurisdiction they’re in, so you don’t have all these cross-border issues. The old approach

[passage 12](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) up in a position where people just repeat the same behaviour that they always have done before, and it was always okay so it should be okay now, or they deal largely with local suppliers, because the local suppliers are likely to be in the same jurisdiction they’re in, so you don’t have all these cross-border issues. The old approach that we took to enabling global trade in spite of these fiat property guidelines was that we basically produced continental-level integrated trade blocks. The first big one of these is probably the Soviet Union, you have a single law from one end to the other, you could argue that America was actually the first continental block, although the states were dramatically different from each other until really the end of World War I, but one way or another, the European Union continues the trend, modern China continues the trend, one law per continent has basically been the thing that we attempt to approximate, and this is quite useful, because a continent is a sensible size of political trade. You kind of have a railroad network, and there’s coextensive region where the law and the railroad network kind of have the same domain, everywhere that’s connected by rail you kind of have the same law, and that has held us in pretty good shape right up until about now. But now we’re in a domain where the international will towards this kind of uniform global order is rolling backwards. The Trans-Pacific Partnership failed, the European Union is in trouble, I think it would be unsurprising if you saw America break up into some fairly large units in the next 5–10 years... You’d just about see a vector where the South of America refuses to accept election results that indicate a Far Left Democrat is elected, and you could see some kind of secessionist or partitioning movement. The same thing in the South of Europe: Spain, Italy, Greece all having problems keeping their countries together... We’re in a position where these continental blocks are kind of breaking down, because it turns out that a lot of what comes along for the ride with this trade integration is a whole bunch of craziness about social policy, and everybody hates social policy. It doesn’t really matter what the social policy is, at least one thing that your government institutes as social policy will get right up your nose; almost nobody agrees with everything their government recommends. So, what we really need is to think sensibly about the global level. We’ve got global warming, we’ve got things like slavery baked into goods, we’ve got a whole bunch of toxic waste which is being dumped in by the developed nations on poor countries, or being dumped by poor countries on even poorer regions of poor countries, and all of this stuff is global trade network problems. But we don’t have a global government, and the people that have nuclear weapons are unlikely to accept the formation

[passage 13](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/global-governance-in-the-era-of-blockchain-815cfbd06eca) whole bunch of toxic waste which is being dumped in by the developed nations on poor countries, or being dumped by poor countries on even poorer regions of poor countries, and all of this stuff is global trade network problems. But we don’t have a global government, and the people that have nuclear weapons are unlikely to accept the formation of a global government. If we did have a global democracy, you would discover that the vast majority of people would vote against most of what you consider to be your fundamental human rights, because those rights are relatively recently created and enforced, and so we would see some very, very serious breakdowns, but this doesn’t mean that we couldn’t potentially build an architecture that supported global regulation of trade on a more or less case-by-case basis. Imagine a future in which an object uniquely identifies itself , and I don’t mean the object identifies itself as “This is a bottle of water,” what I mean is “This is this specific bottle of water: it was pulled out of this well, it was bottled at this time, the bottle is made of these components, it’s got this ownership history, it has this environmental profile,” we know everything about that bottle of water, the entire context is carried there, including the legal structures that currently govern this bottle, and if I take that bottle across a border, the legal structure associated with that bottle changes. You could just about imagine this. You kind of have some way of figuring out what an object is, and the object is bound to all of the relevant law, and when the object crosses from one jurisdiction to another the relevant law changes. At that point, we can imagine a world where your software could automatically inspect everything that you happen to be carrying, and make sure that when you cross a border you’re not accidentally taking something somewhere where you shouldn’t take it. You walk into an airport, and your phone starts beeping and says, “You’re carrying nail clippers in your pocket. Could you put those back in the car or throw them away? You can’t bring them in here. — Right, okay.” That notion is no stranger in the future than Google Maps is now. The idea that you can navigate around the physical landscape using a computer to make all the hard decisions seems totally natural . You get out of an airplane in Bangkok or in Dubai or somewhere, and you just pull your phone out, it tells you where to go and it’s generally pretty accurate. The same thing could 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

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/851-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [851] Global governance in the era of blockchain., part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.