# Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin with Vinay Gupta Virtual Futures Salon (part 2 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [864], part 2 of 3. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2018-10-16 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- Career works it belongs to:
  - 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)
  - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine)
  - Half a Trillion Dollars a Year of Magic: Blockchain, AI, and the Future of the Built Environment (2026): Mattereum essay: combine AI with the blockchain into self-enforcing smart contracts and move real estate... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - 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)
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: money laundering (4 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); speed of light (5 here; 20 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Davos (2 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); John Perry Barlow (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); basic income (4 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); venture capital (4 here; 26 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); science fiction (5 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Barlow (2 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); Mars (4 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); one computer per planet (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2016)
- Importance: core-text score 0.18 (1.00 is the top), number 387 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [768] [#03 - Vinay Gupta : History of Money, Foundations of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/768.md): close in content (cosine 0.97)
  - [791] [COP26 Event: Green Blockchain, Green Economy (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/791.md): close in content (cosine 0.97)
- On the same works, just before: [607] Pavlo Tanasyuk - Internet of Agreements - Space (2018); [608] Kryha - Internet of Agreements - Space (2018); [606] Mattereum Highlights - Rob Knight on the idea behind the... (2018)
- On the same works, just after: [721] [Vinay Gupta, founder Mattereum, putting assets on the... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/721.md); [597] Mattereum Smart Property Register - Rob Knight (2018); [598] [Mattereum Smart Property Register - David Salgado (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/598.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: Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin with Vinay Gupta Virtual Futures Salon, video, 2018-10-16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [864], https://guptaoption.com/texts/864.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 3
[37:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=2265s) the market turns out to eat everything I mean it hasn't quite consumed religion but I would give that another ten years so and what do we do about the FATA market it's every everything you turn governments itself into a market it's a possibility and you could think of the crypto space as being an exploration of what happens when you create these extremely pure market environments it's it really is hyper capitalism and you're running and you see what happens and in some ways I think it's quite useful to think of the entire crypto ecosystem as being a kind of virtual nation in which you're experimenting with the new stone governance you put this kind of hyper capitalism into the machine you run it for a while you see what happens um that sounds like hell and the way well I do agree stay topped in hell right and you know I mean I'm not deny that I'd have an awful lot of fun right now right I mean seeing lots and lots and lots of technologically progressive smart people running around with more money than they know what to do with and by the way I'm not one of them I took legal advice early but the you know watching that play out around me has been you know an extremely interesting phenomena right because why see is that when you've got smart people with a bunch of money if you do really interesting things and the locking up of the capital inside of the existing institutions has left us basically far under playing our technological heart globally and there were very effective lookin plans to build interstellar space ships in the 1950s it's called Project Orion you take five kiloton nuclear bomb you put it underneath a 300-ton a cast iron plate and on top of that you've got a huge part of Springs and on top of that you put a bunch of car dates and you book detonate at the bomb it compresses the springs the momentum of the steel plate continues to keep you going and then when you begin to slow down you drop another nuke and it takes about 17 or 20 nukes to get into orbit it takes another 50 to get up to something like half the speed of white and it means you could get to Alpha Centauri and back with the robot probe or a crew in like four years and we've known how to do that in general terms literally since shortly after World War two why are we not doing this what are humans for if not to go out there and explore the universe the only thing stopping us doing that is we don't seem

[40:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=2415s) to be able to organize around those kind of projects and that's a governance issue if the Americans have said look the moon was fantastic next thing we're gonna go and do his Alpha Centauri and it's not gonna be because it's easy it's because it's hard the moon is not enough we want to really know what's out there we could have heard it in a radio broadcasts coming back from a robot chef or even a human chef decades ago you could have watched you know humans landing on another planet in another star system in your lives but we didn't get a rock together so the notion that we need to basically tear up the rulebook and get our game together seems pretty reasonable to me I just wonder if

[40:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=2453s) they yeah the reason the Silicon Valley execs are obsessed with AI and with space travel whether it's this musk on one end or Kurzweil on the other I just wonder if it's based on old simplistic model that harks back to Adam Smith it's the the economic model of Adam Smith the minister production space for these guys is all about infinite land AI or automated robot entities is essentially all about infinite slave labor force and then what I worry about is that blockchain is essentially a third part of that puzzle which is the infinite growth of capital if we're basing it on such a base and old 1700 model are we in trouble soon oh it's much worse than that right but that model is not the same no no that's that's not a 300 year old model all right go that's a billion year old model and it's called life right life expands to fill every available niche it mutates into the niches that it can't currently get into and it fills all the resources get pulled into the living world all right so I'm not saying that the market model is a true representation of the state of nature because it's obviously not right I mean we became multicellular almost certainly through cooperation between different kinds of organisms and markets are very bad at arranging cooperation they focus on one aspect of nature and imitate it they're very much a product of their time right the Darwinian nature red in tooth and claw thing was a very incomplete understanding of evolution but the end of the day why are we here I think it'd be quite cool if in five billion years you had a bunch of unbelievably evolved posthuman entities looking back and saying you know those 21st century humans really did a good thing when they got off the planet you know they brought you know they took evolution into the stars and here we are five billion years later enjoying the fruits of their labor thoughts worth doing right to be all of the generation over species that went interstellar as far as we can tell from all available data we'd be the only living things that I've ever done it that's worth doing I don't think anything else is really all that important against the ground sweep of cosmic history getting into the Stars is the only thing that really matters everything else will crumble but if we get out there and we figure out how to live out there and we figure

[43:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=2603s) I have a spread out there there's a lot of out there and that worthwhile nothing else you're working on is really all that important right it's all these local obsessions that people fuss with oh my goodness gracious look at this it's a terrible thing yeah really compared to us getting hit by an asteroid and everybody dies and that's the end of life in the entire universe none of it matters right we blew it really badly after World War two when we put the plutonium in the top of the missile and used it to attack each other rather than put than the bottom of the missile and using it as a nuclear rocket engine yeah but a bunch of kids made a load of money from Bitcoin so right but think about our political concerns against this background which is the real background it's the biological base this is the real bio politic the real bio politic is life expands and money doesn't it turns cannibal because we did not go to the Stars when we have the opportunity we are murdering each other on earth and we're not gonna stop murdering each other on earth until we reclaim our birthright which is the high frontier we must go or we will murder each other

[44:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=2666s) let's bring it back to rest room for a second try see ya and let's talk about let's talk about the project you're working on the may take us to the moon or the Stars or nor elsewhere which is very different from Bitcoin insofar as it's based on a similar technology in its aetherium so let's talk a little bit about aetherium and smart contracts and all of the things that may allow us from a terrestrial perspective to live in those potential futures mmm well this is the thing that Furion put on the table was this concept of the smart contract and the smart contract is basically a very light way of arranging mass cooperation it's a it's an agency problem there's an exact word I'm looking for it is the public choice right you put up a contract the contract is tied to some set of actions that will be automatically approved by the contract you load the money into the contract and the thing is immediately performed so that ability to do social choice through that kind of smart contract gets you the possibilities or you kinds of and it also Souls the coordination problems which are the heart of a lot of our inability to do things like properly fund open source software so I more or less completely ignored Bitcoin when it came out because I'd been part of the gold economy and indeed that currency alone didn't buy your social change it just wasn't enough but the ability to get something that had what David Reed calls the group forming Network capability something that can allow people to organize new social structures and solve these collaboration problems that seemed extremely interesting so I got involved and so far we haven't done much of the stuff that I'd hoped for the ICO thing I wrote a piece about two years really a year before the ICO things started to explode and what I assumed is that to get that kind of explosion of project funding we would need the ability to do equity crowdfunding so in order for the people who are buying tokens to have political rights to govern the projects by voting shareholder democracy which is the standard for public companies you need to have voting rights attach the tokens the problem is that we issued the tokens but for regulatory reasons we couldn't issue tokens with voting rights and as a result we phoned up with a whole bunch of very disenfranchised shareholders who right now were laughing all the way at the bank but then the project's either have to deliver or not deliver and it turns out to be really hard to spend 150 million dollars in a

[46:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=2816s) responsible way that will generate shareholder value you know a friend of mine says look even a turkey will find a hurricane right and in this enormous lis expansive boom environment it's very very very easy for people to raise amounts of money that we cannot spend in a way that will generate profit so you know without having shareholder democracy and effective democratic governance of these projects how do you vote somebody off the board of an IC o---- team if they've done something really dumb we just don't have any way for the token holders to get political representation explicitly because the state will not last do that because then it becomes a securities issue so we're kind of jammed in this position were the real social power of these things to have the people that fund something being direct political control of it is being hung strums hung hamstrung by outmoded legislation and I would like to think that that problem is solvable not sure that it is right the approach that I would take which is to enfranchise many more people to become what they call accredited investors so my suggestion is that there's a technical accredited investor category that allows people that have irrelevant degrees or professional experience to become investors in these kinds of projects that's the approach that I'd like us to take because then we could build this in franchise shareholder democracy but the track that we've taken is to basically try and build everything as a commodity and as a result there's no political representation and you know that to me is a huge missed opportunity and hopefully some jurisdictions somewhere will take a risk figure out how to issue tokens that include shareholder democracy measures require things like board meetings and elections of the officers and all the rest of that stuff and actually begin to mainstream all this business into something that gives real political power to the people in this case the people that have funded projects and that stuff I mean you know how much is the Mars mission gonna cost right a couple of hundred billion dollars five hundred billion dollars I don't know how much it comes to when you start talking about transporting a million people to Mars to go and build a self-sufficient civilization but in all probability that's going to wind up funded with crypto money probably the Bitcoin bubble will be the thing that builds the Mars mission we're just going to ice you on your last smash trip you know these things are super tightly related all the Silicon Valley money is building spaceships well that's great

[49:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=2961s) feed on and his buddies when they can offload to Mars but what about the rest of us spinning so it feels like the the blockchain project the the most exciting the most interesting thing about it is this word decentralization so we messed up so John Perry Barlow and his declaration of the independence of cyberspace he always envisioned cyberspace being decentralized in the manifesto he said that the government's aren't welcome here we will decentralize this this internet thing but we grew the stacks we created the centralized powers of Google Facebook whatever the the Fang acronym is now is there an opportunity within bot chain more broadly to take back the Internet if the internet became the construction projects that John Perry Barlow never wanted do we need a demolition and can we use blockchain to build not web 2.0 but web 3.0 so finally we get to talk

[50:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=3023s) about economics because this is basically an economics problem right um so you guys are frequently economists who knows about John Nash and Nash equilibria okay and what about Ronald Coase coves going once going twice wow this is gonna be fun what about your hide Bank are okay right get ready you're gonna do some economics so what Nash explains in his early work is how we get locked into situations which suck right in its simplest form the Nash equilibrium is obsessed she aeration which is a situation which is terrible for everybody and nobody seems to be able to change it because everybody would have to agree on what the solution is and it all have to change at the same time highly problematic and once you learn to see these things you see them everywhere they may not be strictly Nash equilibria in a technical sense but you begin to realize this particular quality of coordination problem has to be solved to unlock something of value lots of that around and then you get coast coast to me is the most important you can kind of body of economics to understand and again you know there's a vast body of work attached to codes I'm just picking out the thing he's best known for which

[51:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=3104s) is a paper called the nature of the firm which he wrote in 1940 and then won Nobel Prize forever not an economist I'm a for some of the details so coasts basically says look the if markets are efficient why do command and control hierarchies inside of companies exist why is there any reason for that to be there the answer turns out to be the decisions are expensive and deals are expensive the transactions and the decision making have real costs and inside of a command and can or hierarchy you make the decision once and then you have an economy of scale because the decision is then employed over a hundred thousand workers at IBM and that economy of scale and decision-making is why companies are big and when information gets cheap companies shoot in theory become small

[52:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=3149s) so this is a very very powerful effect and the rise of the gig economy and all the rest of that stuff is often attributed to Koshien factors information got cheap finding gigs became cheap it was very easy to go and you know post that you needed help and post that you wanted the hare egg how does it offer the help and all those systems together produced this kind of very fluid kind of Airbnb style environment a banker then comes along and says look to really get this stuff to work fully you need to operate inside our Commons because most of the benefit that's produced from these kind of activities in a post scarcity environment which is to say digital files can be replicated endlessly um most of the value that generated in these kind of situations is indirect and hard to capture so if you look at something like Wikipedia Wikipedia's benefit is its enormous completeness and its enormous completeness is hugely more valuable than any individual article inside of it so all the Wikipedia editors are indirectly benefiting from each other's work and the only reason that it holds together socially is because it's united by the fact that all of the what content is licensed freely you can use it for anything you like so everybody benefits for everybody else's work inside of this tightly bounded commons and your banker who called the

[53:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=3221s) well for networks or truly explains their stuff and it's fantastic and those three that's the kind of economic tripod you need to understand cryptocurrencies now where was I going I got rights I try play someplace again but you were you were giving us the economic lasting that underlies things like a theory think of makes it different here's the thing that we missed right for some reason and I think this is none solved problem in economics in this incredibly low friction internet environment we wound up with enormous seas of little companies which is exactly what you'd expect from coasts but we also wound up with the stocks so why does our mother zone exist why does eBay exist why this Facebook exists an ultra low information cost environment do we get these enormous swab like companies which have vast command and control now one possibility is that those companies aren't companies because all of them are implement extremely complicated and sophisticated internal markets for capital allocation so it may be that we call it a company but it's actually a marketplace and that's a very strong possibility particularly for Amazon Amazon with several internal markets and externally facing markets and the other possibility is that there's simply an enormous chunk of economics that we don't know possibly something to do with behavioral economics and I'm chair so it may be may be that for an individual consumer making a decision based on brand actually results in a winner-takes-all environment which produces the stocks because you know how many brands can you really remember it's certainly not eight thousand so it could be a behavior economics limit but please somebody in this room if you know the answer to this question write to me and tell me because I've been trying to find the answer for years I just can't find the economist so the transformative bit right the thing that we wanted was the ability to do orchestration of new social structures with very low transaction costs and if

[55:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=3337s) you take this kind of social internet thing right the whole kind of social media thing and you imagine welding it directly to the ability to raise money and target projects you could imagine a pooling together of the social and the financial in a way that we do our ficient resource pooling to do things efficiently right you can pool the money to go there and rent the bus you can pool the money to go there we rent the ski watch right and that kind of thinking you know what does it really take it needs the ability to rapidly move the money to coordinate the problem so cool things to pieces same logic applies to build in the hospital right same logic applies to running the welfare status you could very easily imagine basic income and a blockchain where you use the blockchains traceability to gather the evidential data that you require to set the level of basic income you use the evidential data from the blockchain or the spend in history to identify when somebody's formed a monopoly or a cartel because the data about the payments is right there right the possibility is that you could use the blockchain to really police the basic income system to look for people who were skimming how do you identify when you've got a cartel among landlords that broke in the free market in an area so that you can pull the basic income payments well here's the data here's the not total pricing here's the fake one that we set up the sold the stock market prices boom now we know who the problem is there's a huge amount of possibility there but do we have the political will do enough people care about their own living conditions to forum structures that look like unions to improve them because the union is right that's how you've got your weekends it's how you got your minimum wages it was the bedrock of the process that gave us the NHS the unions really were the things that improve the quality of life for general people more than any other single factor and they are gone right

[57:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=3449s) before we move on so talk very quickly about identity and the blockchain which I think is one of the most important messages we do have time for audience questions what we're going to ask is that you just come up and queue in the aisle here for the process of the filming if you have an audience question please join the back of the queue on the aisle I will be using a mic just here so please start moving now and no questions clearly and in the meantime you're gonna have to come around to the mic you can have to walk you have to walk and in the meantime I'm going to ask you than a identity and the blockchain in what way is that such an important and potential use of blockchain technology sure we're gonna have a little bit of hubbub here let's give them 30 seconds yeah 30 seconds yeah it's butane to breathe the identity thing is gonna be deep and if you leave now you're gonna miss the ending when he reveals what you should be investing in net so I recommend you stay you want to pay that student stay marvellous borrow balls all right guys let's do this all right so before we before we go to audience questions actually know what they're let's go straight to let's do the identity it's good right so the identity thing is very very simple right right now everybody has a name that they were given by somebody else right you're given a name by your parents you've given an ID number by your nation-state your university your employer and everybody else people are really always given names by other people so in the blockchain community there's an awful lot to talk about what they call selfs over an identity which is a really really ground with thinking about things and I think it's a name which is fundamentally misleading right because your name is not your identity right your identity has always being self sovereign you've always been the person that is you there's nothing new about this notion of self sort of an identity what is new is the ability to assign yourself a unique name and this is really what generation of cryptokeys gives you it gives the ability to generate a unique name for yourself and to give people a version of that name that allows them to communicate with you without being able to steal your identity that's all public key cryptography is generates a way for you to communicate securely with me but not

[59:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=3599s) to pretend to be me you can send me a message but you can't fake my identity so this notion of self assigned names self assigned unique names gives us the ability to organize all kinds of things in the world because right now one of the biggest problems we have is we don't know what things are called for example if we take this bottle of sprite this bottle of sprite has no name of its own right it is Vinay's sprite right TM right but it is not in any way shape or form address so other than me I'd drop it it's no longer of any sprite it's a mysterious category we called garbage and it's got an identifier on it if you see this barcode but that's an identifier not for this bottle of sprite but for all bottles of sprite it's a it's a class identifier so we've got to D bar codes and we've got crypto we could put a 2d barcode on here that was a self assigned name for this bottle of sprite and then when I bought it I could be bound to that name that was my sprite if I dropped it we know whose garbage it was and doing that for individual bottles a sprite might seem a little bit excessive but we could do that for industrial pollutants we could do it for toxic waste we could do it for all kinds of problematic things and it's part of building this kind of container that you need to build an ecologically sound society so we could give names to individuals this way they could make their own names we could do that as a way of creating a global identity Commons in which everybody can communicate with everybody else securely and they could know exactly who their message was going to we could do all these things but it's not just for humans right it's for humans it's for machines it might be for processes you know think of like invoices every invoice has a different number and every organization it goes through I don't need to do that anymore generate a key assign a key have all the people who are managing the invoice given the ability to read the mail that comes into the key all of this stuff is possible but it all boils down to this question of how do we think about the naming of things and that's a question that goes all the way back to the deepest myths of our civilization and innovation in naming things is generally gonna be a revolution Sonne that note we're gonna turn to some audience questions and thank you guys for queueing up and gentleman just say it's working oh we better be working can cryptocurrencies be considered as a potential rival to gold since it fulfils

[1:02:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=3749s) the same purpose and concept hmm so the thing about gold is that gold is really old so cryptocurrencies might be a rival to gold in the short term but until they've got a couple of thousand years of use there we'll still be a tendency to say well you know this stuff hasn't been around as long as gold and doesn't really solve the same problem um and we live in a world where we have a kind of pool of a couple of billion people that live in a very fast-moving culture but we also have half a you know half of the human race who grew all of their own vegetables on farms that you know they work by hand and for those people it could be two or three generations before cryptocurrency becomes fully tangible to them but if you turn up with a bag of gold anywhere in the world they know who you are so I think it will take a really long time measured in centuries for there to be direct compatible utility but you know that doesn't mean the gold price won't be impacted by cryptocurrencies just that the age of gold is a valuable thing it gives it a quality that can't be replicated by crypto thank you thank you ah hi so one of the main appealing things about crypto anarchism is that in a virtual blockchain state you can do away with state oppression and we can work towards self governance but how do we reconcile that with the fact that blockchain was initially used for money laundering and you know the whole Silk Road scandal so how do we prioritize illegal things like money laundering to terrorists with just like freedom and the whole libertarian notion of self-governance well I mean the real hard core of libertarian argument is who told you these people were terrorists right they just view all the thought as being free trade included well the money laundering can be used through the blockchain fun like terrorist terrorist groups but really hardcore libertarians will tell you who told you these people were terrorists and money laundering is just free trade right the people that originally designed the blockchain thought that those kind of uses were completely within the scope of what their role in the countenance because they thought they were fighting against was a much worse form of oppression which is the tendency of states to commit genocides so if you have a system where all power of centroids in the hands of the state the genocide risk killed a hundred and fifty million people in the twentieth century

[1:04:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=3899s) maybe more so compared to that all the terrorism and all the organized crime and all the rest of that stuff become evaporating room tiny water problems so the original architects of these systems viewed all the terrorism and money-laundering organized crime and all the rest of that stuff as being completely acceptable prices to pay for reducing the power of the state to commit genocide now I'm not saying I agree with that but the original architects of these systems understood those trade-offs and paid up from my personal opinion on this is the both extreme decentralization and extreme centralization create accountability free zones so if you think about an institution like the Catholic Church which is the normally center enormous ly centralized there's very little criminal accountability for things like sexual abuse by priests they're incredibly protected by the central authority at the other extreme if you go to areas which are rural and poorly policed people are doing all kinds of crazy stuff like burning plastic waste in their backyards contaminating their environment with dioxins all this kind of stuff and there's no accountability there either so at the extreme as we get spaces with no accountability it's in the middle where we've got multiple competing entities that are watching each other that you get accountability so I think there's a general design principle you want systems where people are watching each other if you want an accountable system at the extremes you get zero accountability whether it's centralization or decentralization and I think it really is one of these things where you have a Goldilocks point where things are about right and the extremes are basically life denying and humanity destroy so essentially surveillance is the solution to surveillance capitalism yeah I'm not that into the notion of unanimity on a vast scale but I like is accountability and transparency and accountability and transparency has to be enforced from the bottom of sousveillance and because otherwise these things just don't work right I mean if you look at the drops in police violence that come when people are made to wear body cameras that didn't have to wait for police to have body cameras that could have just been a simple protocol for everybody of course the police as soon as an interaction begins and if the police were okay with that and it was expected excuse me sir I've got to stop you for a parking ticket we do my turning on your camera that's the way we should have done it it should be normalized into policing that the police ask you to make an independent recording as part of the performance of their duties that's how we should police the next question thank you hi I was finding what's your opinion

[1:07:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=4049s) could you lift the bike so thank you hi I was wondering what's your opinion on tango as next generation Dale Tate on tango and do you agree with Vitaly butsudan that it's the developers of AI ahead like well definitely flawed decisions or DC maybe has the potential to be more efficient just in terms of not having transaction fees and such okay so this is a hard computer science question and the short answer is I have not done a rigorous enough analysis of these systems to know I've spent most of my free bound in the last year kind of worrying about the legal questions and the technology is gonna march on its own tracks am my gut feeling is that storing every transaction on every node is probably in the long run going to turn out to be excessive on the other hand storage is so cheap that the correct answer might just be to pay upfront do it the hard way but this still leaves the question of how do you get the blockchain to be fast and the short answer is nobody really knows yet so I think this is one of these kind of high frontier situations where a thousand flowers will bloom and maybe somebody will figure it out but it's extremely hard for me to say I think the Lightning networks are gonna be truly amazing right because they're simple they're cheap they're powerful they're easy to understand and they're fairly transparent and implementation I think that the extremely complicated systems were not all nodes store all transactions are maybe gonna behave unpredictably in the real world but that's a very wait and see sorry I don't for more concrete answer okay well I was running just because like we saw happen to aetherium network when crypto kittens came out and slow down so drastically oh sure I mean the page it's actually like a real problem for the technology forwards oh yeah no everybody knows the theorem is slow they kind of slower those systems aren't just slow but you know the plasma which is basically kind of like a lightning Network but for smart contracts will help and then there's Casper and the move to proof of stake which wow that's a big jump and if that works it's a totally new game because we also get rid of the environmental footprint of mining and that's a huge step it may be that mining is the kind of industrial revolution dirty a phase of the blockchains development and then you finally get into this kind of revolutionary point where the thing finally becomes a social structure rather than being anchored into the industrial mining operation and then a new game begins thank you thank

[1:09:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=4199s) you hi my question pertains a bit more to about like privacy because this idea of the blockchain being open and everyone being accountable stuff it's nice but at the same time if I send someone Bitcoin they can click on my address they can see how much money I have now all it really makes very much sense as a sort of a currency I don't want to tell Starbucks and which is in my bank account every time I go get coffee and it doesn't make sense yes oh yeah yeah so again you know let's just get the can opener out dump out the can of worms so Norway until I think relatively recent they're probably still publishes everybody's income as part of their national tax records you can look up how much money people are making and that works in an egalitarian society we can go so well in America and there are obviously a lot of possible solutions to them right the hard core thing I mean the real atomic bomb in this is the the ZK snarks so the possibility that you could actually do this very very very intense cryptography in a way that produces total on an empty for the transactions frankly scares me really badly because it removes all possibility of having social control of cryptocurrencies and z cash you know they don't have smart contracts yeah but what the smart the fundamental primitives from this stuff are being built into a theorem and I don't know what kind of a social equilibrium you get in a world for a Z K stocks are widely distributed because you know Sentra's asian bad total decentralization bad ha zone is somewhere in the middle and the snark she looks like an irrevocable movement towards the extremely decentralized end of that spectrum I'm not sure we're gonna like what we find out there thank you my question is um so there's some people who believe that bitcoins or bubble and although I heavy invested in crepitus I think there are some truths to that because it's quite what's happening right now is quite similar to like the tulips effect in 1630s and people people just happen to agree that bitcoins a certain price of other cryptocurrencies a certain price and if we want to prevent Bitcoin from being a bubble what needs to change okay so there is no doubt at all as it currently stands that the entire blockchain system is a bubble right you've got six hundred billion

[1:12:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=4349s) dollars of copper ore and you've got practically no profits right that's not a hard question right you all have about kind of you know sixty billion dollars worth of profit if you're going to value something that sixty is six hundred billion dollars so I'm not seeing sixty billion of actual profit however right should they begin to build one two three percent of global GDP improvement you could very rapidly see sixty billion of actual revenue or sixty billion a virtual profit come out of the cryptocurrencies exists then it would be like you've kind of taken the bubble and sprayed it with concrete now it's a bridge and whether we're gonna manage that or not I don't know the other thing is stock markets right when we think about the tulip bubble but there are ways stock markets were astonishingly fraud filled and explosive and you know the possibility is that you wind up with a very very messy early phase like there are we stop mark it's hard then we learn how to govern these things we learn how to balance everything out and you get a system which is much much more performant so you know possible could go either way but I think it's very likely that you're gonna see a pretty apocalyptic crypto crush at some point I think it's my queen that you're going to see kind of Fiat coins like Dora coin and yen coin become issued by governments and I would be unsurprised to see something that looks like Visa or Swift but a process is smart contracts and my guess is that that will be an international consortium with one node so they'll be you know the Chinese clearinghouse the American Clearinghouse the European Clearinghouse maybe a Russian one maybe an Israeli or maybe a few others but that model will be cut out very strongly based on the nation-state much in the same way DNS is the alternate track is the the nation-state paradigm breaks horribly because the dollar becomes you know extremely badly impacted by political risk and that contagion brings down both Europe and China as integrated units right and in that kind of a scenario you could very well see internet governments become global governments probably in partnership with the UN so in those kind of scenarios your Bitcoin is underpriced even a hundred thousand dollars thank you but you're right it is more profitable in apocalyptic scenarios it is a hedge against the bosphorus destruction my question is we take electricity as granted in the developed world but in the developing world it's very problematic and access to it is sometimes Carson unreliable and people rely on personal generators especially in sub-saharan Africa how do you think

[1:14:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=4499s) peer-to-peer energy trading namely smart micro grids could be implemented in developing countries so one of those clients I'm currently working with for my main company which is material is doing a blockchain based payment system for micro grid management so you have this kind of so what material does is basically the legal work required to make a smart contract legally enforceable 150 something countries and that allows you to do things like transit physical goods because you can you know get legal control things so in the electricity case you basically have some kind of token payment that goes in one direction and ultra city goes in the other direction and the Gateway on that is a smart meter backed up by a smart contract backed up by law and those systems give you the ability to capitalize large-scale rollouts of this kind of community scale solar an individual scale solar so solar rights we've got you know a little bit so upon a couple of bad reasons of LEDs of revolutionized Africa they're saving households on the order of $100 per household per year which is often five or ten percent of their income and there are stories about areas where you know the solarites arrived and suddenly people started putting roofs on their houses because you know they're just enough money to do capital investment but you can't get modern amenities with this can palm-sized sewer panel you need systems where when you want to run a heavy appliance you've got something with a big battery that you can draw on that refills and you don't want to put one of those on your roof because you don't use enough parent you don't have enough money and you can sort of see that there's a whole bunch of questions about how you get an organization of community will around doing something that requires pooling funds and that problem is good fit for this technology so I think you're gonna see a lot of capitalisation a small scale solar wind or for that kind of technology thank you next question after keep him quick because we're closing up at 45 hi my name you mentioned earlier that you thought the cryptocurrency market in general is in a bubble and something that I've been thinking about a lot is what would the mechanism have to be for that bubble to pass to burst and I would love to get opinion on on what the actual mechanism look like for example with the global fragile crisis it was like it was a lack of liquidity or the bubble burst and actually look like more would need to happen what's the likeliness of that scenario ever taking place so I think there's basically three obvious ways it could go and in all

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