# Vinay Gupta - Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [863]. 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/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: video, 2016-06-01 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaH5HDhtWo4. Text: automatic captions, uncorrected - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015), before the law step (Mattereum, 2017). - Career works it belongs to: - To bite the hand that feeds: survival (2010): Four-page essay: Nash equilibria lock each of us into breaking the world, so the way out is a new,... (suggested by machine) - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine) - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine) - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine) - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: one computer per planet (3 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); global democracy (4 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); failure to govern (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); world computer (1 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); global governance (1 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2009) - The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): one computer per planet - Importance: core-text score 0.16 (1.00 is the top), number 415 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [747] [Startup Societies Podcast - Episode 34 - Vinay Gupta (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/747.md): close in content (cosine 0.92) - [752] [Vinay Gupta: The Cities That Will Walk Away (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/752.md): close in content (cosine 0.92) - On the same works, just before: [290] [test (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/290.md); [286] [Ouishare on global democracy and the real sharing economy (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/286.md); [284] [Daniel Pinchbeck and Vinay Gupta discuss using... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/284.md) - On the same works, just after: [282] [Wales 1 (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/282.md); [283] [Digital Bauhaus 2016 backup camera footage (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/283.md); [279] [Jon Husband (Wirearchy inventor) and Vinay Gupta discuss... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/279.md) ## Reading it Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it. Cite as: Vinay Gupta - Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin, video, 2016-06-01, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaH5HDhtWo4; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [863], https://guptaoption.com/texts/863.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaH5HDhtWo4&t=0s) [Music] okay hi everybody so um maybe the place I should start is making sure that everybody is comfortable with their understanding of the blockchain raise your hands if you're comfortable you've no particular okay right so let me give you the nickel explanation because it looks like about 80% of the audience really are not comfortable very briefly working through time right uh here is 1970 and it's where we invent the database and in this era we have one computer per organization and the computer is very heavily protected and guarded because it's very physically fragile we come across to the 1990s and in the 1990s we have one computer per person and the computers are networked together to give you a kind of higher function than you would have with a single individual machine and that format of one machine per person and everything is networked is still the dominant Paradigm of computing it's what we all use every day and there are a few variations within it like document Centric Computing which I'll say a little more about then you get over here and ear you know 2010s you get [1:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaH5HDhtWo4&t=80s) the evolution of Bitcoin and this model is really one computer per planet it's the early stages of building a single interface to all of the computers in the world where they share information they share State they share programs so for example if you're using something like Bitcoin the entire world agrees on what your bank balance is if you're using something like ethereum the entire world agrees on what program it is that you're running um so this model of one per organization one per individual one per World these are three kind of paradigmatic Ages of computing and we're at the very first stages of the one computer per World phase and it will be as different as the 1970s model of the computer was from the 1990s model so the difference will be from the 1990s model of computing to the modern model [2:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaH5HDhtWo4&t=135s) continuous change is normal within that there's a bunch of very very scary high-tech weirdness to produce the integration of all of these little computers into what Gavin calls the world computer um that process of integration is still at its earliest stages we're only just figuring out the right way to do this um the similar processes for the 1970s era involve things like SQL query optimizers which you've probably never heard of in the 1990s there's a whole bunch of very scary information Centric mathematics to make sure that you can successfully transmit a signal over an ethernet cable if you don't know about that stuff don't worry about Bitcoin mining don't worry about ether mining it's a lowlevel technical practical detail So within that framework what kinds of things can you do with one computer per planet right and this is kind of a weird notion but I think the obvious thing to do with one computer per planet is fix climate change before it destroys Agriculture and leaves billions of people to starve that seems like a fairly reasonable kind of an objective you know there are all kinds of little optimizations you could do with these things but fundamentally the big unsolved challenges that Humanity faces are climate change and resource scarcity right we're just burning too much carbon and although we are rapidly decarbonizing the economy it's nothing like rapidly enough also once we've decarbonized the economy there is no guarantee that there won't be another environmental crisis right on the back of it for some different reason so right now the world is run by uh essentially uh trade organiz ation for Nation States called the United Nations and the United Nations is an organization which gives you no individual representation at all you only have representation through your government so it's not that surprising that we the people don't feel like we have any control of the world because we don't have any control of the world we have a little bit of influence on our nation state but then our nation states are part of this large Trade Organization and the trade organization doesn't really represent the people it only represents the organizational form of the nation state and the nation states have had 30 years to get oriented to climate as a problem and have done essentially zero it's very clear that the nation state is unable to engage in global challenges that require coordinated action because 200 nation [4:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaH5HDhtWo4&t=285s) states are incapable of forming a sufficiently shared understanding of the problem to then take effective action on a solution and this is not a small crisis right when we can actually watch the carbon dioxide and the planetary warming information in front of us what we're seeing is a failure to govern ourselves in a way that puts our very existence at risk I can't think of a worse species for us sorry a worse uh crisis for a supposedly interal intelligent species to face right can't think of a worse crisis for a supposedly intelligent species to face than being so unable to govern itself that it basically boils itself to Extinction on its own Planet this is completely unreasonable so to get past [5:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaH5HDhtWo4&t=325s) this problem the one computer per World Paradigm would allow us to potentially build Global governance without Global government now the distinction between governance and government is quite subtle but basically uh a bank is an institution which moves money around and it provides a set of services similarly a government is an institution which moves governance around and produces services so in the same way that Bitcoin allows you to issue your own currency ethereum issues allows you to issue your own governance you can publish a set of rules which are essentially law for anybody that chooses to put their assets into your set of rules right and this is quite radical but you know break it down right 1970s databases 1990s networks 2010 the network and the database and the programming language combined into a single Global structure you put your software into that Global structure every every body in the world can see it everybody in the world can run it all of those pieces of information are fused into a hole so suppose I'm trying to do something about climate change right suppose that we decide and these are big jumps but just for instance suppose we decide that every large scale emitter of carbon will publish its uh carbon emissions directly onto a blockchain and by a large scale emitter I mean a nuclear uh a power station I mean a coal plant I mean an oil refinery I don't mean your car right we could take this very very large scale data we could enforce publication using the public will we could use the same kind of campaigning techniques that were effective on say uh the fight against ozone damage we could have broadscale public action for transparency and climate emissions so we could actually see where the carbon is coming from and with all of that information logged into a global system we could then also po potentially and this is quite speculative but hear me out we could also potentially have one person one vote for the entire world to decide what we're going to do about this set of facts because the lifeblood of democracy is truth without truth there is no democracy and as you all know we have a very hard time reaching the truth these days because of the massive [7:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaH5HDhtWo4&t=475s) monopolization of the media by large corporate interests without truth there is no democracy so if you start putting the facts of the situation onto blockchains so that there is one truth that the entire world can see it becomes imaginable that you could then have Democratic decision- making at a global level now the immediate question is how could we possibly get 7 billion people to vote and the answer is you don't need [8:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaH5HDhtWo4&t=500s) 7 billion people to vote if we had a hundred million randomly selected human beings around the globe for many issues 100 million is a statistically significant sample if for example 80% of that 100 million people are very against an idea and that 100 million is genuinely chosen at random it is almost certain that if you did a vote for 7 billion people it would still be a resounding Universal no and this notion that you could take individual statements of opinion plus extremely sophisticated public uh opinion analysis software and prod produce a rough estimate of global public opinion on a set of key issues seems entirely credible and reasonable different academics could publish different analysis of the global data set but in the areas where there is a heavy uh convergence of opinion in the public it is likely that all of those models will Converge on the same basic thing so for things which are between 60 and 40% split you might have lots of argument about whether it's 51% or 53% or or 49% but for things where it's 80 20 or 70 30 it should be relatively easy to do a first cut analysis that tells us given a set of agreed on facts what is the global public opinion now there are things that this doesn't address in areas where the facts are heavily culturally determined where different cultures have different opinions about the truth in other words it is very difficult to imagine a system like this working so it's probably better for scientific data than it is for matters of history or public opinion good example would be the Armenian Genocide where what is true depends entirely on who you ask and it's extremely heavily contested right there are hundreds of millions of people who will tell you it never happened similarly uh in areas where there are heavy problems around the nature of the models or policies which are proposed a bunch of people say something will work a bunch of other people say it won't work it's very hard to imagine voting on that basis leading to any kind of solid outcome so this is not a universal way of fixing Global democracy it's not a universal way of running the planet but I think it's a really good fit for climate change and I think it's a really good fit for a lot of the other environmental issues around things like for example nanotechnology and biotechnology I think the world is overwhelmingly against for example the release of genetically engineered organisms directly into the wild and I think that it would be quite easy to [10:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaH5HDhtWo4&t=650s) have a global public opinion established where we could statistically prove that the world on the whole was against the release of GMOs into the environment and once it is clear that that's Global public opinion it becomes possible to punish the governments and the organizations which thwart the will of global democracy in the name of their own self-interest now in this sort of model right all of the history of colonialism and the history of the invasion of poorer countries by countries which are now massively richer will eventually be exposed it's impossible to talk about the world in any kind of objective way without dealing with the fact that there was an enormous period of piracy and looting by frankly the ancestors and most of the people that I see in the audience and the the resources which were stolen during this period are still the foundation of the wealth of the western societies similarly there's no way of dealing with uh you know no way around the fact that something like 90% of the carbon that's been emitted into the atmosphere over the entirety of human history was emitted by the countries that went through the Industrial Revolution early and are still enormously rich and powerful and are largely blocking any Fair discussion of the climate process so when you get into this kind of model where you begin to talk about globalism as a real practice for individuals one of the things that you have to face is that we're going to wind up with a vastly poorer future for the majority of the people that are in Western countries right if you actually have to pay fair prices for the carbon that you emit if you actually have to make reparations for the enormous transfer of wealth during the colonial era if you actually ask the people of the world what their opinion is they're not actually terribly pleased with the Western powers and what they've done with the money that they stole so when we talk about building a truly Global sharing where there is truth and there is democracy we will have to address the resource division issues and the resource scarcity issues which is going to mean an enormous transfer of wealth from the rich who stole it to the poor from whose ancestors it was stolen and we can't have Global democracy until you are willing to abide by the rulings made by a brown Planet which was robbed blind during the colonial era and if you give people the power of democracy they will largely vote to tax the west and use those [13:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaH5HDhtWo4&t=800s) resources to fill in the enormous developmental deficits left by the colonial era and this is the point of the sword this is the hard problem the price of a global democracy is fairness Truth and Reconciliation around the colonial era are you ready for it or --- End of [863] Vinay Gupta - Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [282](https://guptaoption.com/texts/282.md) Wales 1 (2016); the most closely related, [747](https://guptaoption.com/texts/747.md) Startup Societies Podcast - Episode 34 - Vinay Gupta (2019); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.