# Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin with Vinay Gupta Virtual Futures Salon (part 1 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [864], part 1 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 1 of 3
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=0s) you are in for a real treat this evening I am blessed to be able to welcome Vinay Gupta to virtual futures tonight's event has been organized in collaboration with the University of Warwick and the Department of Economics 360 lecture series my name is Luke Robert Mason and I'm the director of virtual futures and for those of you who are here for the first time the virtual futures conference occurred at the University of Warwick in the mid 90s and called its co-founder it arose at a tipping point in the technologies ation of first world cultures now whilst as most often portrayed as a techno positivist festival acceleration ism towards a posthuman future the Glastonbury of cyber culture as the Guardian put it it's actually hidden behind the brush still the silicon designer drugs the charismatic prophets and the techno parties was much more sober and much more urgent what virtual features did or at least tried to do was cast a critical eye over the phenomenal changes in how humans and nonhumans engage with emerging scientific theory and technological development the Salon series completes the conferences aimed to bury the 20th century and begin work on the 21st so let's begin tonight the legendary crypto thinker Vinay Gupta joins us for an event that serves as a warning a warning of what might happen when radical new technologies are co-opted by opportunists when a failure of imagination forces continuation rather than transformation and where collective action leads to conformity rather than resistance because it seems we're at a crossroads when it comes to blockchain technology that would dominate tonight's discussion either we can leverage the toolset to enable an open decentralized network of exchange offering us the ability to build the web and even society as we wanted or we can merely use blockchain technology to radically stimulates all of the worse things about capitalism by simulating fiat money the latter

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=150s) sadly seems to be our current reality and much of the hype around blockchain is being driven by the belief in the infinite growth of its cryptocurrency counterparts Bitcoin and if the get-rich-quick opportunity of Bitcoin is the reason that you're here tonight then I would leave the room now instead spend the time finishing your application for your internship at one of the big four accounting firms because the future doesn't need people like you but the past will welcome you with open arms if however you have a genuine interest in radically rethinking economics and if you're open to the idea that blockchain might reveal the possibility that our species might actually be collaborative rather than competitive then I implore you to put your hands together and join me in welcoming Vinay Gupta to the virtual futures [Applause]

[3:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=220s) so Vinnie very simply what is blockchain what is it and more importantly what should it be hmm well so I have a new way of telling this story you know I'm continually figuring out how to explain it because the way that language works is that when something new occurs we give it a name which is kind of like something we already know right the classic is horseless carriage and then we spend a long time explaining what it is to people right there was a five or eight year period when everybody explains the internet and then there was social media and there was years and years and years of people explaining social media and then you got generation of people who are young enough that it's always been there and then you stop explaining it because they learned what it was the first time and at that point the name refers to the body of implicit knowledge that they've acquired so blockchain is in that space where we still have to explain that because most of the people have gone from not having around to having around but for you know Kennedy folks are your age royal younger it's kind of always being there at which point it doesn't really need to be explained it does her need to be contextualized so the way that I think about this is that the whole blockchain situation is driven by physics we think of it as being an economic system but actually it's a physics management system and the piece of physics that it's managing is the fact that the speed of light is really slow at three hundred thousand kilometers a second sounds faster human being but if you're doing computation on a computer you have a silicon chip that's maybe a centimeter across and you do computation by racing light across it maybe five thousand transits and a piece of you know light to get one edition and what that means is that you can have computer systems that do substantial work in relatively short light distances visa for example does one credit card transaction in roughly the length of time it takes light to travel ten kilometers and what that means is that it's impossible to synchronize the world because the computers are moving so quickly that they're doing tons and tons and tons of computation in the length of time that it takes the light to travel somewhere else to tell people you figure it out and managing that problem is basically the key challenge of our civilization but you can't build a single global synchronized world because of the speed of light limit and we're trying to find approaches to managing that and there are several you know multi-billion dollar projects to try and solve that problem each one of which shapes a different part of our economy in a different part of our reality now you've described blockchain as one computer per

[6:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=370s) planet could you just explain what you mean by that well so the objective of the blockchain is to produce a computer which appears not to be subject to the speed of light problem um so let me run through the big systems the hardball speed of light and I think that'll help us put things into context so the first big system is GPS so GPS you have the earth and around the Earth you've got a network of satellites the satellites have an atomic clock on them and they send out a tiny signal that says what time it is according to the satellite then on earth you take your film out and your phone listens the signal from the GPS satellite and this satellite says it's 12:01 and it arrives at 12:00 or 1:00 this satellite says it's 12:01 and a tenth of microsecond and when that arrives you know that you're further away from this satellite in your from that satellite and you basically triangulate the distance all these satellites by listening to them tell you what time it we're using the speed of light as we look heating ourselves and GPS totally transform the way that all kinds of things work I mean imagine trying to get around if the GPS that or it failed we don't be lost all the time disastrous second system is high-frequency trading so this is the you know huge machines that manage commodities trading and practically all the physical stuff in the world who goes through these machines in its raw form the closer you are to the exchange the better your trading advantage so literally every hundred meters out the rent on the buildings drops and people are charging you know on the order of a million dollars a cubic meter to put computers close to these exchanges and that's running lower voice the entire commodity systems more or less any physical object has gone through that system the problem with that model is that its geographical so for example if you want to trade from China to those exchanges you're going to get to the exchange of last or you're going to have to come onto American soil under American law to get access to that trading system and in a moral twitch is genuinely globalized the idea that you're going to single country which runs the exchanges for the entire world seems a little improbable if you put one exchange per continent which might be a stable political equilibrium how then do you synchronize the exchanges so that's the second one of these machines with this kind of problem that it comes with a bunch of political context that we don't want thirdly machine is Google spanner which is probably a lot less well known than hft so spanner is how Google makes things at Google Docs work you don't thing where you've got multiple people editing a document at the same time and it never seems to go wrong so one part

[8:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=520s) of that is a whole bunch of very clever math around operators and the other part of is a Google spanner which is a synchronization network of all of Google's data centers to atomic clocks and they do an enormous amount of measurement to know exactly how long it takes to send messages between the data centers so your message works its way to the closest google data center they then log it into the spanner system to figure out what time it happened at and then these sequence of things in time so that you got a coherent editing experience rather than the chaos of everything being desynchronized and you know I use that like multiple times every week and if it didn't work my productivity would drop by like 10 or 20 percent I mean that's a major utility and much the same with the GPS so along comes blockchain adoption attempts to fix the problem with spanner which is that spanner although it's geographically distributed runs under the control of a single corporation so HFT you have a single nation a single geographical point in space with the spanner model you have a single corporation and if you want access to the tiny system you've got to go through that corporation so the blockchain achieves global distribution so it works everywhere and it's not under single entities political control so it's the first of these synchronization machines which has any possibility of being a stable global trade system because it doesn't make in either corporate or government control and that's not a simple as that means individual anarchy right that's a cute way of thinking about it but it's all good the real story is the real story is that it allows us to begin to conceive of building governance structures above the level of the nation-state which my eventually be able to address global problems now this is where some of your

[10:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=625s) interest in the blockchain came from ze or an interesting individual you mentioned the word and okay Vinay and I'm not sure what we can and what we can't talk about but so what extent do the advances in software cryptography and distributed systems so what extent do you think they can tackle some of the problems that you're personally interested in well so let's think about this in terms of kind of the long arc current around 2001 I got seriously interested in the future of the world this is about about six months before 9/11 I kind of had this sudden awakening the fact wait a minute something is really wrong out there and I got much more interested in global issues in my personal life after 9/11 I spent basically twelve years going from energy policy to natural disaster management I invented refugee shelter called the heck seer which is extremely successful Burning Man but I can't get the humanitarian agencies to use the damn thing because it lasts to one and so during that kind of twelve year arc and what I figured out was that there are a couple of fundamental problems that you can easily state so the first problem is it when human beings feel that they lack something they need they become aggressive and there are only two places the aggression can go you can direct other human beings through mechanisms including economic competition or you can direct and nature in the form of extractive industry and that's pretty much all we've got so unless we find ways of getting everybody what they need we're going to continue to be exposed to enormous amounts of violence and exposure to violence is not simply something that happens the losers the winners are also exposed to violence because if you're the person who's wielding the stake you're just as exposed to the violence as the person getting hit and nobody really wants to live life that's dominated by violence so you have to think in terms of resource abundance as being the way that we unpick human psychological violence and to some degree physical violence but getting to resource abundance is extremely difficult because so many of our systems are run on pure competition and even worse they're run on status competition which is an endless treadmill so if social status is coupled to me consumption you're going to wind up with an infinite consumption of resources you literally wind up with people writing their name by moving stars into new constellations in a thousand years if we continue to have a society that's dominated by status competition because status competition that consumes material resources will never be satisfied will always push whatever limits we have right to the edge so what

[12:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=775s) I wanted to try and figure out through that 12-year arc was how do we build the essential mechanisms of life at a cheap enough level that anybody can afford them even the people that are already very poor most of the work on poverty assumes that the solution is to make poor people wealthier so that we can compete in the market for resources but then you have this water problem if instead you take the price of essential goods and services and you bring it down to the point where the poor can afford them on their existing budgets nobody gets politically annoyed right nobody sabotages markets uh-oh look we've got this amazing $15 cell phone and it's almost as good as an iPhone - what about everybody's delighted if you say well I want to do is organize you know farmers in Bangladesh to double their wages you suddenly have problems so I took a very serious crack at that came to the conclusion it was totally possible I spent 12 years discovering that nobody would fund it and then decided that you know I was going to try the Elon Musk model of just take a billion dollars out of market capitals and then fund the research myself and that's what I'm doing at blockchain and how's that going Vinay you know war - the knife knife to the hilt now you

[14:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=845s) started in a really interesting place insofar as how you came to blockchain and that was with this weird obsession with colonialism and the current state of the West could you explain how colonialism and blockchain in service well strap in who here is from a country that was invaded by the British including Scotland and Wales yeah the episode moments the university of war yeah there it's a good thing so I used to say to people you know the secret to understanding kind of European history is the Norman Conquest never ended you got a bunch of French eventual Vikings that conquered a corner of France count out over 150 years or so and then came to London and basically invaded the country then they did Wales then they did Ireland and that it's Scotland then North America South America Africa India China and now we call them lawyers and that kind of ongoing wave of this very aggressive approach to resource grabbing has become the dominant model right I mean Britain invaded something like a hundred and ninety countries so we invented countries that do invade countries that don't even exist so in that context you think all that's over right and it's really not um the history of for example political assassinations in Africa is pretty much any time anybody stands up and says African Union pan-africanism we're going to get everybody together we've got half of the world's habita landmass and most of the world's remaining untapped natural resources what's the negotiate they shot right I mean there's just no denying that political violence is used to keep resources cheap and we all benefit from that right I mean if you look at the price of fair trade coffee compared to normal coffee imagine how much a Fairtrade laptop is gonna cost five ten thousand dollars it could be a factor of five increase of the current price of a machine could be a factor of ten so whether we like it or not there's an enormous amount of violence baked into the goods that we buy every day and right now that violence is destroyed the visibility of that violence is destroyed by markets when you pay for something in cash and the the information about the object that you're buying is it'll be what the manufacturer wants to tell you if it's not printed on the box you don't know and nobody is going to put on the box of your device and you know a URL for a camera or you can watch somebody manufacturing it nobody's gonna show you

[16:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=995s) her the raw materials came from by you know having a drone fly over the mine once or twice a day and you know live-streaming the stuff it's just not there technologically we could do that socially really nobody wants to know right and you know if you think that that's about form of electronics wait until you see meat consumption right we're in a position where we sever the knowledge about the suffering that creates our world from every transaction that we complete in the marketplace so the interfaces that well chain has the possibility that if we get our game together you can track the entire history of an object through every single phase of transformation that causes it to exist and if any one of those phases is morally unacceptable to you you might be able to do things like pool money to change it all right it's not just as simple as you buy Bronte or brand B if you can see the problem is way up the pipe maybe you can get direct access to the point of the pipe where the problem is you know this coal town mining thing that's completely unacceptable how much would it cost to fix that you know Oh twenty eight million dollars okay let's crowdfunder because if you've got the global visibility of what is happening and where things are wrong it becomes possible to efficiently target resources at repair when that sounds all very well and good and it feels like the response

[17:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=1070s) to that right now is is corruption that's the legitimate form of resistance in this case but if we use blockchain to enable anti-corruption will we able to be will we survive the truth so essentially will we survive the burden of radical transparency from a social perspective of do to us well I mean you know here we have to look to our friend a guru Nick land Nick Lang comes back to the University of Warren all right the dredged up okay so I mean the the whole kind of Cthulhu trip right does everybody know about the the American writer of HP Lovecraft so this is the University of Warwick there is one VF alumni who was here in 1995 when Nick land was in the philosophy department here the continental philosophy department here in the University of Warwick and yet it will fall on death is the name but I feel it there's an important history let's do it so HP Lovecraft was an American horror writer and he's very widely misunderstood he's been out of fashion for about a hundred years because people thought that he was writing pulp fiction about nonsense terrible tentacle monster Jerry he's kind of the original hand tie guy so in this it's not that funny so these are economic students going how do we get from bitcoins to tentacle monsters go on so the thing is that Lovecraft is not writing about monsters right what he's writing about is science what he says very clearly is that scientific knowledge is continually destroying our feeling that we're at the center of the universe first we discover that time is nearly infinite then we discovered the space is nearly infinite we discover that the unknown mysteries of things like you know DNA are completely outside of human understanding as we currently have it we have no idea how this stuff works evolutionary history is just this astonishingly destructive process and here we are sitting here is going to replicate and once a biome now Lovecraft says humans can't humble this kind of truth and he tells stories about monsters which embody these kinds of truths so you have kind of a two hundred million year old thing that lives under the sea and the important thing about it is not that it's kind of a giant Godzilla with a tentacle mask the important thing about it is that it's 200 million years old and it's still alive and the horror that he's trying to

[20:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=1220s) convey is that human beings are tiny so right now there are 9 billion human beings alive seven and a half headed for a night and that's a really big number if you work in computer science you think no that's bigger than you can fit in a 32-bit in it it's a big number um it's very hard to conceive of one in a million well there's sort of 7,000 people like that right you know it's a really big number and when you start thinking in the logistical terms right how much let's say toothpaste do seven and a half billion people consume in a day and then you think well maybe a third of human beings have a toothbrush the rest are using like twigs or their fingers and you kind of do the math and it turns out to be like 200 million tons a week or some absurd number and there's a point where your sense of the world just breaks when you look at the world as it is from this kind of gold I view rather ins than inside the very tightly contained confinement of our wives the objective statistical view on reality is astonishingly toxic or ordinary models and it will usually produce you know astonishingly deep personal crises when people begin to glimpse what the objective frame looks like it's a very hard thing psychologically and if you wander into that territory you know there's a writer called Robert Anton Wilson because very nice set keys for getting back to some kind of normal balance once you've glimpsed the enormity of the situation let's pull from monsters just for a

[21:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=1305s) second and go back to the thing that is probably the reason at least half the audience are sitting here which is they saw the word Bitcoin on a poster and when I should probably know about that yes I know that's going to come up in an interview and I am fascinated to know how many of the individuals here have money in Bitcoin currency or aetherium right now by show of hands all right everybody else look around keep your hands up now put your hand keep your hands up if you've just got in so that markets say in the last 18 months there's a shame for you lot that's what I'm saying it's gonna be a rough ride you're the smug buggers but it's gonna be a rough ride so look bitcoin is the thing that this community to a degree they think they can pay their student their student loans with and let's talk a little bit about Bitcoin and what it is and how it functions because you started with something which was the precursor to Bitcoin which was e gold Oh tell us about egos how that went tits-up and why those people were there hands up a second ago should be petrified so e gold was a 1990s libertarian currency and it was account based so they had a server if they gave you an interface that with like eletronic banking and the accounts were denominated in grams a physical gold that you could request them to in a full reserve system so it was started by an oncologist in Florida called Doug Jackson in his bedroom on a spreadsheet and gold aficionados would send him coins in the mail he'd wave them and he put them in a box and people could then do transactions and the system grew and grew and grew and grew until there was an enormous amount of money in there I think it's like 120 million dollars of gold reserves which by Bitcoin standard you think that's not a lot of money that gives you a sense of how distorted the Bitcoin story is um and one that gave you was the system which is more efficient than modern blockchains you can make micro payments down to a third of a cent profitably and you could do a hundred thousand dollar transaction in which we two seconds from Watford it was a very efficient system they kept asking for a banking license from the American government so that they could be normalised into the mainstream financial system and the

[24:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=1455s) American government kept saying that you're not using currency so it's not a bank and then about 2005 arrested all of them for banking without a license that's kind of ironic but that sort of thing gave us a taste of what you've got in a kind of libertarian environment it was not necessary to have identity documents to open an eagle to camp right you could which we just send them gold or send the money and they'd open up an account and they'd put credit stuff and you know they weren't doing anything kyc all of that sort of stuff is very close to what later happened blocked it and I'm fairly convinced that the whole decentralization thing starts when you know people who know about the fall of e-gold are just like right that's not happening again we're coming back with a bigger stick and this is where you get Bitcoin it comes out of that contra and ask for a Bitcoin itself there are two fundamental ways of understanding it right if we if we take the technology that implements it as being a separate story and we just say okay with that technology what have they done right and there are two ways I think about the first is they've created a monetary policy that you can buy into so you put your money into Swiss francs you get Swiss monetary policy you put your money into and there's an Bob Wian dollar you're gonna get involved with monetary policy very improve your money is a choice and you're buying the Montreal over the state that you're investing in in the same way that you're buying the kind of corporate governance and marketing scaled products caliber viewer called corporate effectiveness of a company whose shares you buy so with the technology taken they then implement a monetary policy which is discounted King thing where they're going to continue to print money but they're going to half their money that they print every couple of years and eventually they will print no more money and that's your money supply right if you like that model you buy Bitcoin the second thing is that they've basically gone probably accidentally and created a hedge against dollar volatility and so the dollar is volatile because Americans are insane you heard it here first you know I mean it's it's just not easy to understand

[26:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=1585s) why America is in the condition that it's in right now but it might literally be something in the water I mean gold was just Rome was destroyed by lead poisoning and the Americans had a long experiment with destroying their civilization with lead poisoning in the form of leaded gasoline and it may well be that there's an environmental contaminant was driving the wall either that or its cultural problems of a kind that are almost unimaginable in Europe but one one way or the other Americans are nuts and you can tell the American is in the room Wow yeah one or two is it true are you nuts sorry so the so the crux of this is when you've got the world's largest nuclear superpower with a military budget that is equal to everybody else's military budget combined and electing people that you really probably wouldn't hire to run a burger franchise you kind of have to stop and think like okay and by the way that's not just the current president that's the whole of Congress right it's a whole of the Senate the American system produces an enormous amount of Muppet REE and and you know that system has been pervasive for decades right they're really in trouble and in a way that you're not really seeing the European countries still generally elect pretty high quality leadership whether you like them or dislike them they're generally competent the American system seems to continually throw up total spanners so in this kind of situation having the world's reserve currency be in the hands of a population that makes such unpredictable governance decisions is super dangerous and if the door breaks because they elect a left-wing president and then you get armed insurrection in the south of the country which is a very plausible scenario you can easily imagine the Bitcoin would suddenly become an international trade currency and that is a very unexpected question you have similar problems in Europe so the Spanish Civil War West an enormous amount of unresolved issues between anarchists and fascists in Spain the Greek Civil War left similar issues between Communists and fascists in Greece and it always only been a country for 120 years something I thought that longer Garibaldi before that it was warring city-states basically one per city under the split in the north of ATAR Italy who they're essentially culturally similar to Austria and the south where they're much one in the Greek model has never been kind of formally resolved so the prospect that you could see large-scale armed conflict in the south of Europe has people redraw their maps and fight about their welfare states that seems very plausible to me

[28:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=1735s) and in that situation what then happens to the euro and what do you do with refugees in the millions who simply take the EU passports and start walking and that is one of the reasons that the current Bitcoin price could be thought of as being rational because you think that it's being a hedge against political mayhem in the you know large kind of euro American power bloc maybe it's not that irrational to have kind of six hundred billion dollar hedge so what you're essentially telling us Vinay is the only way Bitcoin can match its valuation is with we have a complete collapse of Western civilization Oh a couple of civil wars as a collapse of Western civilization we've lived through worse in living memory is there another option it could there be could there be essentially

[29:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=1785s) could we see a twenty trillion dollar b2b internet could we see Bitcoin match its valuation through something which is essentially egalitarian something there's a lot more positive than all-out collapse well well let's talk about the scenario and then we'll decide whether it's positive so the other the other way that this could work is this right now well but what so let's think about how the internet developed right the internet had basically three phases that the first version of the internet we'd talk about is the Internet of ideas and that was the period before we got credit card processing and in that period it was impossible to make any money online so all that was online was people's hobbies and that internet was an amazing Internet because it was relatively small it was generally populated by people that were nerdy as hell and it was very very efficient for moving information around because everything was done as text so if you like to read what really smart people had written about weird easy pirate copies that was the internet for you and many of us still miss it um then a bunch of people figure out how to use cryptography to protect credit card transactions right all you've got to keep is a 16 digit number and a couple other bits of metadata secret for long enough for somebody to run a transaction for a sheet and this becomes the Internet of shopping right and the internet of shopping is a vast thing it's like a trillion dollars it's three of the world's five largest companies and it's the dominant paradigm and really nothing changed when social media came along social media simply was the Internet of advertising for the internet of shopping nothing changed and that's running to the present day and then you get this blockchain thing and you've got the possibility for a new thing everybody has a different name for that uncle at the Internet of agreements you could say the internet contrasts you could say smart so ever it was but it's an Internet that's got the ability to do a new class of representation specifically the 90-day payment invoice so invoices with long payment terms are how the real world works and the supply chain is 45 trillion dollars a year and most of that 45 trillion will be paid for by an invoice which is sent from one person another person as a PDF file right yeah might get bit of automation using things like si P but for the most part business of business Commerce is done in very archaic ways see containers you know you have a sea container that makes its way through a kind of 200 million dollar robot port that covers 41 acres and it's still being managed by a

[32:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=1935s) kind of four inch that wall of documents are duct-taped to the door you know this makes no sense at all so the prospect is you could take that entire world of box shifting and 90-day invoices and you could build an electronic representation of that stuff in a way that would allow you to run it efficiently and sea containers bumped local GDP by on the order of 7% because they got rid of huge amounts of the difficulty of shifting goods around the planet and if you just fixed the paperwork on sea containers that's like 3% of global GDP so there could be a multi trillion dollar per year economic benefit from blockchain right in form of vast savings and then on top of that there's the new market development so if you rent an air B&B it comes with whatever furniture was in the air B&B but you can imagine a situation where you had an empty air B&B and you just kind of picked this stuff that you wanted in it from some set of templates that had been designed by interior designers and then all Vander's who had components of those things would run them into the house and set a knob just like they were in the pictures and you could move into exactly the place you'd always wanted and then when you were there everybody comes gets their stuff back and it's all pooled out into these pools again the reason we don't do things like that is because the delivery services are flaky it's hard to ensure all these funny little transactions for short rental of goods the logistics of getting all that stuff in and out or nightmarish and all that stuff that's Amida both for things like smart contracts robot warehouses and self-driving vans if you put all of that stuff together it's pretty easy to imagine that you could put in an image of what you wanted to a machine it would go and pull the resources at the various places that were rent and yet assemble it there you know you have a team that basically caches the stuff as it comes off the robot trucks and then does the final layout and you move in while that would be amazing right and those kind of things are the things which produce enormous changes in the base with ways that people live you know things that you'd use every day for the rest of your life if they existed kind of a GPS is now for your people that want to navigate and so you could see a very very very radical shift into this kind of post-industrial hyper fluid economy and if that actually happens which i think is likely but the question is how long again the kind of valuations that you see if in words things like Bitcoin might be under survival but it requires change at that kind of scale to justify a six hundred billion dollar bubble so when we sit right now I'm not gonna let you get away just yet on the Bitcoin issue because you've said Bitcoin will die it is the myspace of

[34:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=2085s) digital currencies so I want to quiz you just a little bit more with regards to what you think will happen with Bitcoin and how government's will look at Bitcoin because governments have allowed Bitcoin to exist Bitcoin doesn't exist in a sort of stateless vacuum that you hope blockchain will allow and the big issue with blockchain is is what some people are calling is the antisocial issue so it's a bet on Bitcoin is to

[35:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo209FQzT4E&t=2115s) essentially bet on the ineffectiveness of the current form of human order the government so we have this weird tension going on between government and governance Bitcoin and blockchain where do you see all this playing out very well I mean we have to face the fact that our governments are basically useless they're terrible institutions because everything in society has accelerated by a factor of a hundred or a thousand in the past 400 years but we still vote once every four years and the fact that we haven't done any update in the machinery of democracy doesn't challenge the purpose of democracy or even purpose change the correct political philosophy of democracy but what King challenges is the machinery of democracy so we should probably have updated our democracy when we invented railroads right we should probably should have updated again at the advent of massive publishing of newspapers we should have done another whatl update for radio and a much bigger update for television we should then an update for the internet there's been generation after generation after generation after generation of political change in the way that the economy's work the political economies but we haven't updated this four-year vote in business and even relatively tiny changes I think could give us much better government for example one on one pair scheme of mine is that rather than reacting 600 MPs once every four years we could just continuously elect MPs one hour time every two weeks an MP stands down there's an election and they another one comes up and you basically live just a calendar that runs for you know four years during which time every MPs downside and somebody else comes in and the thing just goes county by county by county in some kind of order maybe start with the north and just that change would continually pressure government to work with what people wanted because if things were going badly you just Lucy after she after she after she and you could watch the encroaching majority die and it would get rid of this four-year swamp thing that we currently do no you might need some buffering and some of this and some of that but even something as completely um pragmatic unlimited in the scope for error as that still strikes people as being unthinkable change so the static nosov governance in an exponential accelerating technological change environment the government is worse and worse and worse and worse relative to state-of-the-art institutions so there's your first problem um the second problem is that

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/864-2.md (part 2 of 3).
End of [864] Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin with Vinay Gupta Virtual Futures Salon, part 1 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.