# Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin with Vinay Gupta Virtual Futures Salon (part 3 of 3) > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [864], part 3 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/.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 3 of 3 [1:17:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=4649s) probability what happens will not be one of the three obvious ways so I can talk about these things as scenarios but reality is always stranger than fiction or prediction so the first thing is you could simply see the bubble be that somebody comes out with a new technology which is so much better than the existing crypto is that everything didn't pulls out one dumps into the other right we came pretty close to the flip inning last year where Ethereum was really marching pretty hard up on Bitcoin and if that had got much closer I think you could have seen panic selling a Bitcoin panic buying of ether I am NOT a financial adviser I do not hold any of these assets my lawyers tell me I can't trade okay fine second possibility is you get intervention from the state right that's all right when you say intervention from the state so the American government says well we've kind of had enough of this Bitcoin thing and what's arrest everybody and you sort of think they couldn't and actually they could the approach that they probably take is that they would suggest that the fundamental purpose for bitcoins was actually laundering drug money and then they'd use the amazingly enthusiastic American seizure laws to simply confiscate all the money that anybody ever made from touching Bitcoin ever and they'd freeze like two million bank accounts said it would be an enormous disaster and the people that had socked up a bunch of gold in their houses against that possibility would be setting much happier than the ones who had all liquid or in fear so that's kind of scenario to scenario three is mass public disillusionment and mass public disillusionment you know right now it's kind of hard to imagine that that would happen because everybody's making money if people realize that the batting average on the ratios is like one in a thousand which is pretty much what it's like for venture capital right if they start seeing the same kind of risk return in the venture capital sees on average venture capital loses money the people who make money in venture capital make a huge amount money but the average VC fund loses money if that turns out to be true for icos as well there'll be a point where people suddenly begin disillusioned and then they'll start to bull out of the market so it's only massive massive industrial adoption of these technologies that provides any kind of stability to that bubble and part of the reason that I'm doing the thing I'm doing with my life right now is to attempt to build the interface into the industrial ecology so that we can actually expand into industrial space rather than being stuck in financial engineering because financial engineering is hugely volatile if we have mass deployment of cryptocurrencies and smart contracts deep in the industrial based solving real problems these things become much more stable and [1:19:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=4799s) that's why I'm really working on that's why material thank you thank you [Music] currency is a really hot topic right now look at Bitcoin any theorem transactions are quite slow yep but also quantum computing is a really op topic as well in the cryptographic world we have problems with scalability we have slow transactions do you think these things will be solved before and to what extent before computing assault is complete and once consumed computing is complete how much of a step back or forward II think the critical quad will take yeah that's a good question so um I think the lightning networks will turn out to be super effective I really think the Lightning networks are going to be a big step forward and a lot of the stuff that I drew about Bitcoin being stuck in a technological backwater and unable to evolve is true but they finally started to take it serious in the lightning networks are a good manifestation of that and the quantum computing thing again comes in two layers so there's the break ability of a lot of the existing ciphers under the load of quantum computing and I am not sure how vulnerable most of this stuff is but the general assumption is pretty vulnerable and there are quantum resistant algorithms the one that I remember reading about was n true n TR you have feeling there's a second generation variant at that algorithm so you would require a period in which you took the existing cryptography and run n true beside her and then migrated everything over 2n true without losing the record of who owned what in the process that would be a hairy job but it wouldn't be game-ending um an entry is assays only that's the quantum algorithm I remember and I seem to remember that there's a ton more computation required to do the encryption and much much more storage um so with all that said I think the breakthrough that's more likely to turn everything upside down is homomorphic encryption so I think it's much more likely that we'll get efficient homomorphic encryption early than quantum computation or early and because so much money is going into research or homomorphic encryption and if that cracks I think you'll see unbelievable dramatic and rapid changes that are completely impossible to conceptualize because homomorphic encryption is so completely counterintuitive I don't think anybody's even written science fiction about how the world would look [1:22:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=4949s) if that happened so I think whom were freaking corruption might turn it to completely blind sent us I can't even imagine what happens in the crypto space if that happens ok does anybody want an explanation of whom were freaking Krypton no joke joking joking I wonder if I could ask you to speak about adoption and deployment particularly methods against intervention or for intervention normally when the the government or the nation-state comes up in your conversation it's after a disaster or some kind of emergency are there positive steps that a government or nation-state should be taking towards some of these goals and what might they be so um a couple years ago a friend of mine asked me what the divide what change strategy should be so I went out to Dubai and I had a chat with them and suddenly they had a blockchain strategy and it was what I had suggested might be a good one now I have mixed feelings about Dubai it's a really complicated place but it's also a haven of you know futurism armed relative liberalism relative to what the other countries around it and they're not doing bad work in terms of thinking globally and trying to engineer things like solutions to climate change they're really putting their money where their mouth is on that stuff so before I suggested to them was that they should take all the documents that the government issued and store them on a blockchain so that when you came to the government with a copy of a government document that been issued by another department they could find it internally and verify it that it was actually there it wasn't very complicated it's a big job to implement but it's it's a pretty straightforward thing to imagine and if we have multiple governments that all did that with all the documents that they issued governments could check with each other to see whether a document was correctly issued so you could ask the American governments internal blockchain to see whether this transcript from Carnegie Mellon was a real transcript that indicated somebody really did have a degree right and that ability to just pull together all the information about yourself with proper digital signatures from everybody they issued you those documents it would make life so much simpler and it doesn't have to go with storage of the document you just need to store the hash of the document and the document needs to include some way of regenerating the harsh and if you have that kind of system you could have a system where the proof of the documents is very easy to obtain and I think that would help everybody in a really day-to-day sense um and that's the simplest base case [1:24:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=5099s) right if we did that for all the governments in the world life would improve in a really big way above that layer you then get into the question of kind of technological acceleration as national strategy and I think that would be a talk for another day yeah well let's leave that for a talk for another day and let's give the students who did stay something to walk away with which is my final question Vinay how can the students in this room arguably the blockchain the Bitcoin natives how can they prepare for the possible Bitcoin or blockchain sorry enabled futures ah well so there's the answer which I always gift which is read 1990's cyberpunk uh sorry cyber Punk science fiction right the cyberpunk science fiction is for all of us read and that's how we go into this stuff and it's really useful because it predicted a kind of dystopian future world filled with kind of weird nanotechnology artificial intelligences of a flaky and didn't work properly and all those digital cash transactions of people hacking each other machines to produce political change so that stuff is only really like five years out now right that stuff has gone from being a wild science fiction to being techno thrillers within my lifetime because you don't techno thrower it's science fiction that includes the president I think there's a more profound question here which is what does it like to be in a political elite so I came back from Davos and I was not in the white barge area of the security in the heads of state and all the rest of that I was kind of in the Davos fringe and none was fringe is the most fun I've had in like ten years it was amazing because it was filled with huge amounts of enthusiasm as people ran around spending their investor money throwing great parties and telling everybody that it was a really good thing to do with their investor money um but it was filled with this kind of aggressive optimism right the future so bright we've gotta wear shades they were really pushing this notion that everything was fantastic and this has more of us always how it is with elites the elites have big smiles on their faces because life is great right and the fact that we've got nerds who have historically been very badly discriminately describing against which is usually ableism against autists all of our kind of nerd culture stuff is now becoming economically dominant therefore fashionable and the nerves are becoming in a wheat and usually the elites are very nasty people so to me the question here is can we be [1:27:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=5249s) a better Ally than the previous generations of elites or are we going to in the long run become as hated as investment bankers were for just the same reasons and that to me is a question about morals the thing that I think is critical to nerd culture is this the way that what I'm gonna loose return jock culture works is aggressive competition to figure out who's in charge followed by giving orders and this is a really good way to organize military engagements and I think that jock culture is an evolutionary throwback to tribal battles first you have a fight to figure out who's in charge and then you organize everybody in you execute a strategy you don't kill the other guys nerd culture I think is the people that were back at home napping the flint making the weapons starting the fires finding the food identifying where the game was going to be navigating long distances building the canoes and everything else and most of those jobs require more than a single human to be able to do the job properly so nerve culture the aggression is massively withdrawn and suppressed and a lot of people find that this makes people seem kind of emasculated or barred men are supposed to be aggressive and take up a lot of space the Nerds pull all of that stuff in to enable large-scale cooperation to solve problems which are too big for a single guy making it canoe on your own is gonna take you months you need 20 people to be able to raise a barn to run a flint knapping economy you need the ability to get somebody to travel long distance to bring you the stones you need a guy who can do the chipping and the flaking so I think the Nerds are the original co-operators they're the people that in the human species that figured out how to solve a problem which is too complicated to solve with command and control and I think they've got the emotional and the psychological wiring for that kind of collective activity nerds are really good at working with each other so I think that there's a possibility that this new elite which I occasionally call the nerd right um is going to turn out to be much less brutal than previous elites of bheem but that's only a potentiality we have to realize that potentiality by actually being the best version of nerd culture we can imagine which is one in which cooperation genuinely does outweigh competition it builds on Stallman's foundations with open source it builds on models like Linux and especially Wikipedia and it creates something which looks more like the outbreak of global science than you know the outbreak of one economic aristocracy overtaking another I'd like to see something that didn't look like few doors and being replaced by industrialism being replaced [1:29:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=5399s) by post-industrial ISM I'd like to see that something that looks like the invention of the science and the scientific method followed by you know the explosion of knowledge that came with it and if we can stick true to those principles the possibility is that nerve culturally we will save the earth well there we go if you are a nerd [Applause] [Music] [Applause] what a wonderful message Serena so before we before we close up there's a couple of thank-yous I want to thank the University of Warwick Department of Economics for hosting us this evening virtual futures kind of co-opted their 360 lecture series to turn it into something we do it every almost every week in London and we're gonna do more here at the University of Warwick I want to thank the entire team for helping us film this evenings of Pi and since you're head of department for allowing us to be here a special thanks to you know Donohue from the theatre Studies department for allowing us to retrofit our stage and if you like what we do here in terms of virtual futures you can find out more about us at virtual futures on Twitter Instagram and Facebook we're looking for people to come to us with concepts but before you leave I want to end with a warning because a warning is how we end every single virtual futures and the warning is this the future is always a virtual and some things that may seem imminent or inevitable never actually happen fortunately our ability to survive the future is not predicated on our capacity for prediction although and on those much more rare occasions something remarkable does come of staring the future deep in the eyes and challenging everything it seems to promise I hope you feel you've done that this evening please join me in thanking the incredible Vinay [Applause] nice --- End of [864] Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin with Vinay Gupta Virtual Futures Salon, part 3 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [721](https://guptaoption.com/texts/721.md) Vinay Gupta, founder Mattereum, putting assets on the... (2018); the most closely related, [768](https://guptaoption.com/texts/768.md) #03 - Vinay Gupta : History of Money, Foundations of... (2021); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.