# Blockchain and the Future of Humanity | Malta AIBC Summit May 2019

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [931]. 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, 2019-05 (event month in the YouTube title), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEV_uBV-xAM. 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:
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (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:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: digital identity for things (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); Extinction Rebellion (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); automated morality (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); IKEA shelter (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Shatner (2 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); digital identity (2 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Ethereum team (1 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); refugee shelter (1 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); William Shatner (1 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2019, 1 undated); human rights (1 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2006)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): Extinction Rebellion; digital identity for things
- Importance: core-text score 0.15 (1.00 is the top), number 423 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [678] [WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with Vinay Gupta (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/678.md): close in content (cosine 0.92)
  - [558] [Event Spotlight - Talk at LOGIN 2024 - Can regulators... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/558.md): close in content (cosine 0.92)
- On the same works, just before: [716] [How do we control the material world with smart... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/716.md); [676] [Vinay Gupta on Blockchain, Biotech and Consciousness - E43 (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/676.md); [692] [Vinay Gupta:From Global Resilience to Practical... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/692.md)
- On the same works, just after: [257] [Vinay Gupta - Oslo Blockchain Day - Merging the Physical... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/257.md); [747] [Startup Societies Podcast - Episode 34 - Vinay Gupta (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/747.md); [748] [CCForum and Malta AI & Blockchain Summit Malta... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/748.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 and the Future of Humanity | Malta AIBC Summit May 2019, video, 2019-05, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEV_uBV-xAM; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [931], https://guptaoption.com/texts/931.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEV_uBV-xAM&t=0s) welcome to the second conference in our lineup today the world changing applications of AI and blockchain hosted by zbx blockchain and the future of humanity this new infrastructure provides an unprecedented level of trust how will this play out in the years ahead okay there we are okay hello everybody so I want to start with a simple question which is this is anybody happy with the way the world runs anybody does any feel really comfortable with how all this is I certainly don't um so I want to set the table stakes here which is the vocation is probably one of the most innovative forces in the world and it would be nice if we could demonstrate directly a method for the blockchain to help transform the world into a place that we're all proud to live in rather than being kind of embarrassed and a bit sad if not extremely angry so I want to start with the table stakes right the world is warming very rapidly we've got enormous economic problems which result in an awful lot of people being very poor London has recently been paralyzed by a group called extinction rebellion who were really taking to the streets to make some noise about this and they've been very successful negotiated with the government got a resolution passed declaring the UK was in climate emergency you know they're activists are doing things actual world-changing work but I would say that the Vox shame community has lost track of a lot of its political vision because of the intractable problems of libertarianism at scale right governance has proven to be very difficult the government's have given us a very hard time as we attempt to figure out how to work with them to make the world into a better place largely because we went in to that negotiation with some kind of naive beliefs which have been extracted by regulators we sort of lost our way right we have an enormous amount a very standard very exciting commercial work just to solve business problems but the kind of global vision and global scope that we got started with has gotten substantially diluted and I think that's because it was the wrong vision it wasn't the vision that offered a realistic chance of success and I think we need a different vision for the future of the blockchain so I'm gonna

[2:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEV_uBV-xAM&t=149s) propose a very very simple narrative about how we should think about the future of the blockchain right what is it that we are all working towards collectively and this is way bigger than my company right I do a tiny little part of this story this is a story about literally the future of the block shame how algorithms particularly AI can work with the blockchain to create global systemic change but I want to be very clear that this is a political vision this is a story about how we should approach these problems at the highest systemic and meta systemic level right the first thing is it's very hard to change the system that you're embedded in right the injustice of the world is it's in your bank account it's in your voting it's in your government but it's in the fact that most of your phones were made with labor in countries in which people don't have the right to do things like unionize right most of the minerals that we extract to run industrial civilization these come from bad places and the VOC chain gives us the theoretical possibility of knowing but the practical experience we have is that we are participating in the evils of the world and we feel powerless to change anything and I want to suggest that we have the possibility of change right and I'm gonna tell you how so the simplest thing is this right in the digital age we went through and we do all of the world's knowledge and a fair part of its wisdom and we put that stuff online and we gave every single piece of information a URL so all the information in the world hard names right what I do for a living is I build names for material objects this is the first thing we've done it for it is a figure of Captain Kirk in casual attire owned by William Shatner the actor to the played Kirk in Star Trek and we're working with mr. Shatner on an anti-counterfeiting project for Hollywood that's a very lightweight example of just giving

[4:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEV_uBV-xAM&t=264s) things a name and attaching provenance records to it and lots of people in the blockchain space are doing this right but what I want to suggest is that we need a much broader vision right beyond legal rights for physical assets we need a model in which every asset in the world has a unique identifier like every human being in the world has a unique identifier we already have this vision with self sovereign digital identity we need something looks like digital identity for things and we need this for two reasons the first is it makes it possible to attach legal responsibility to like carbon if you have a car and every time you fill the car with gasoline your car picks up a whole bunch of bad carbon tokens and then at the end of the year you pay a bunch of money to offset those take tokens against Green environmental and carbon offsets or carbon remediation tokens you can imagine a global economy in which people were genuinely able to see the consequences of their actions right you look at your wallet or you look at your bank account and you can see the bad tokens pouring in as you perform actions that aren't offset and this is entirely possible right I mean if you think of bitcoins you could calculate the average co2 consumption of the Bitcoin blockchain and that's how much carbon you've created by the amount of Bitcoin transactions you've done these things are all calculable but not just inside of the crypto ecosystem in manufacturing industry all those folks are working on blockchains for supply chains all the people that are digging in hard to all of those kinds of issues there is a strong possibility right the way across that entire space that the blockchain will become the world's global carbon management system not as a single individual enterprise not as a single point of failure company but as a global carbon management protocol which many many different technologies and many many different companies could connect to and that's a realistic technical possibility it's probably no harder given the tools that we have now then making email interoperate was in the 1980s and 1990s or making the web work properly on mobile devices was ten years ago we really have the possibility of building a global carbon management protocol right across all of these technologies the second thing that comes

[6:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEV_uBV-xAM&t=401s) out of this is that once every object in the world has an identity that can be used for the carbon or slavery free trade or implementation of things like detecting allergens right why does your phone warn you every time you accidentally buy something you're allergic to if you decide that you're not going to eat peanuts because they're bad for you we won't have technological support for that but we also have technological support for things like you don't want to import goods from countries that have human rights records you don't like you set your morality in the software and the software guides you away from decisions which Badri we call this automated morality we need to support from the software to help us make decisions that are truly in line with our values and if we do succeed in building a world in which physical objects have proper computer identities digital identities the other thing is that we can do large-scale optimization so the average electric drill is used for something like eleven minutes into entire life but there's no city in the world where I can have somebody deliver me an electric drill use it for a couple of hours and then send it back again and pay five or ten dollars right we can't rent the things that we need because we don't have the right protocols for handling matter and the result is an enormous amount of overconsumption everybody has clothes in their wardrobe which if you could efficiently rent them and they all was arrived at on time and they were always the right size and you could see exactly how you would look in an application before you put them on every video would have much more access to clothing but we'd have less stuff cluttering our wives all the things you seldom use that stuff won't be rented and then their environmental impact of doing that it might save us 10 20 30 percent of global consumption in first world countries it's an enormous step so I started out

[8:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEV_uBV-xAM&t=506s) on this trajectory in 1990 so 2002 when I went from being a tech guy to being an energy policy guy was after 9/11 and I desperately wanted to do something about the state of the world I spent basically 14 years working trying to get a refugee shelter that I designed into mass production some of the spin-offs from that project have done very well there's a shelter called the shift pod there's a IKEA shelter but what took me into the blockchain space was the understanding that the systemic problems of the world aren't going to be solved just by cheap housing right I knew had YouTube housing we figured out the cheap housing problem the designs are online they build five or ten thousand units here for Burning Man every year there are a bunch of companies selling these things no copyright nope on all open source all of those systems weren't enough to produce the kind of systemic change that I wanted and that was why I joined the Ethereum team and run the launch processors for aetherium although the end product of change has to be reflected in the material world it's all the levels above the material world in finance in governance and accountability and transparency that we need to transform to get the change in the material world that we want which is a low carbon green economy which has adequate resources for all human beings and still has the ability to build spaceships and we can get there we've got the material resources we just need better ways of organizing them and the blockchain is the next step in that even if it starts out with stories and visions so thank you very much [Applause]

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End of [931] Blockchain and the Future of Humanity | Malta AIBC Summit May 2019. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [257](https://guptaoption.com/texts/257.md) Vinay Gupta - Oslo Blockchain Day - Merging the Physical... (2019); the most closely related, [678](https://guptaoption.com/texts/678.md) WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with Vinay Gupta (2022); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.