# The Mattereum Manifesto: green capitalism, product information markets, and the blockchain (part 2 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [165], 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: document (Web page), 2019-09-30 (publication data), https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/how-post-industrial-capitalism-and-a-new-type-of-big-data-will-save-the-planet-6574b1d75bf6. Text: document text
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Mattereum manifesto: the contracting layer and rich data economics.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Whole-Systems Framework for Sustainable Consumption and Production (2003): Rocky Mountain Institute report for the Danish Environmental Protection Agency on sustainable consumption...
  - Asset Passport conceived (2006): First idea for the Asset Passport: digital identity for objects, conceived alongside CheapID.
  - Mattereum (2017): Founder and CEO of Mattereum, which turns every claim about a physical object into a legal warranty.
  - Product information markets (2019): The Mattereum Manifesto: markets for warranted facts about physical goods, including their carbon and labor.
  - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (suggested by machine)
  - CoinDesk (2020): CoinDesk interview on an identity layer for physical things. (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.
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy.
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products.
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... (through a work suggested by machine)
- Ideas developed here: Feudalism vs markets vs the new thing (One Network, One World); Global Village Development Bank; Mattereum asset passports; Rich data capitalism
- Topics: contracts / companies / value (38%); Capitalism, consumption & resources (21%); CheapID, biometrics & identity (10%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Asset Passport (23 here; 33 sources in all, earliest dated 2017, 2 undated); Mattereum (54 here; 127 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); consumerism (8 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Smart Property Register (5 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); property register (5 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); dispute resolution (16 here; 48 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); smart property (5 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Sovrin (3 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); recycling (5 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); uPort (3 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2016)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): second-hand; product information; product information markets
- Importance: core-text score 0.71 (1.00 is the top), number 27 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [753] [(OHM2013) One network one world designing for a 7 plus... (2013)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/753.md): price signalling vs information-rich markets: first framed in One Network, One World (2013)
  - [507] [Product Information Markets (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/507.md): same career work: Product information markets
  - [42] [Home - Mattereum (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/42.md): same career work: Mattereum
- On the same works, just before: [258] [Mattereum - Decentralized Digital Twins (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/258.md); [197] [PRESS RELEASE: WILLIAM SHATNER TEAMS UP WITH LONDON FIRM... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/197.md); [752] [Vinay Gupta: The Cities That Will Walk Away (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/752.md)
- On the same works, just after: [254] [Vinay Talk Amsterdam October 2019 (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/254.md); [758] [#3 Vinay Gupta, Indexing the physical world (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/758.md); [252] [Vinay Gupta / Mattereum Manifesto keynote at the London... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/252.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: The Mattereum Manifesto: green capitalism, product information markets, and the blockchain, document, 2019-09-30, https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/how-post-industrial-capitalism-and-a-new-type-of-big-data-will-save-the-planet-6574b1d75bf6; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [165], https://guptaoption.com/texts/165.md.

## Passages, part 2 of 3
[passage 13](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/how-post-industrial-capitalism-and-a-new-type-of-big-data-will-save-the-planet-6574b1d75bf6) satisfaction, measure progress towards our stated life goals, and maybe get those things instead. Price in environmental damage, and get another thing again, a green economy. The problem is that spending is irrational , and behavioral economics factors thwart the eudaemonic potential to turn large scale datasets about people into the common welfare. We have made computers just smart enough to feed on us like attention parasites, but not smart enough to be good and faithful companions like dogs or horses. I cannot yet meaningfully say to Google “find me a good book to read, but make it a little outside of my norm, the last few suggestions have been a trifle timid” and get any useful intelligible response, but the damn thing won’t stop showing me adverts for books it wants me to read. The stupid system is incapable of partnership, it only knows how to hustle and distract us. We have not gone far enough to get positive results, only negative ones. The system is building momentum, but it is still below the threshold of revolutionary change. Let’s look at other areas where we have large-scale successful attempts to use statistical process control to optimise consumption. Uber tries to put cars where it anticipates there will be riders. It uses price signalling to encourage drivers to turn up during periods when it expects things to be busy. Uber plays the game. Still they seem to have wound up in the same trap as (for example) Apple hardware manufacturing: a truly great service for some people, at the expense of the labour rights of others. The algorithms optimized resource allocation in the pursuit of everyday low prices (or good quality goods which defy our expectations about what phones and tablets can be like, year after year after year). But these systems still wind up treating human beings like machines at every level , and this trend has to be identified and banished before we wind up in Marshall Brain’s vision of dystopia . Amazon is optimizing what is in the warehouses closest to you, based on the ability to get most of what you order to you same day or next day. This is a fantastic example of using statistical process control to optimize outcomes and serve people’s needs: whatever it is you bought, it’s more valuable to you if it arrives quickly. This is an unmitigated good, again extracted at a very heavy social cost: Amazon warehouses really have picked up the reputation of treating people like a cheaper version of machines. Amazon would certainly automate all the way, if they could. And that’s basically it for using statistical process control and quality control to optimise consumption. We haven’t made any strides on the scale of the industrial revolution in the consumption system. Not even close. We need this to happen. Production is already pretty lean, at least for many of our bigger systems. But making consumption lean? The work has not even begun yet. How might we

[passage 14](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/how-post-industrial-capitalism-and-a-new-type-of-big-data-will-save-the-planet-6574b1d75bf6) statistical process control and quality control to optimise consumption. We haven’t made any strides on the scale of the industrial revolution in the consumption system. Not even close. We need this to happen. Production is already pretty lean, at least for many of our bigger systems. But making consumption lean? The work has not even begun yet. How might we begin to make consumption processes as efficient as production processes? Consider the quantity of stuff we buy in the course of our lives for what amounts to experimenting with our identity — goods we purchase to understand ourselves better, or to foment personal growth. We may want to take up the guitar, try your hand at fly fishing, or start learning Tae Kwon Do. As beginners, we often have no idea what the best kit is to start off. So we end up spending large amounts of time tracking down reviews and recommendations, many of which are contradictory. We wind up either getting the most expensive equipment presuming that price equals quality, or the cheapest with the best overall reviews, knowing the goods will have to be upgraded it if the hobby sticks and becomes part of our identity over the long run. All we want to do the experiment. What we don’t want is to be left lugging around the gear if we don’t like the results. This process of experimenting with identity is entirely natural. But make no mistake, this process leaves residue: each of us has that stash of stuff sitting unused in closets, attics, and garages; the remnants of hobbies and identities which didn’t quite fit, and were set aside. We may manage to move some of it along by selling it online or at a yard sale, but for the most part it all just sits there. Old clothes. Ice skates. A helmet or two. Silk paints. Did I ever really wear this much tweed? Apparently so. The transaction costs of getting rid of this stuff are too large for us to take action: the stress of making the decision to sacrifice a slab of our investment and just sell the damn clutter, the time it takes to list on an auction site, the physical logistics of posting it to a new owner, and managing the customer service overheads involved in the entire process often leave the goods (and therefore the capital they represent) stranded. The other approach, just writing them off and throwing them in the dump, seems wrong — both a waste of money, and of the materials embedded in the objects. So instead of doing the rational thing and getting rid of it, we wind up using nearly every square inch of the Boomer generation’s basements, attics, and closets as a sort of informally specified, unsearchable, distributed warehousing solution as the massive superabundant flow of goods from our hyper-optimised production system hits the analogue slackness of our consumption systems, and simply pools in a huge lake of underutilized or obsolete things. There

[passage 15](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/how-post-industrial-capitalism-and-a-new-type-of-big-data-will-save-the-planet-6574b1d75bf6) it, we wind up using nearly every square inch of the Boomer generation’s basements, attics, and closets as a sort of informally specified, unsearchable, distributed warehousing solution as the massive superabundant flow of goods from our hyper-optimised production system hits the analogue slackness of our consumption systems, and simply pools in a huge lake of underutilized or obsolete things. There are tens of millions of metric tons of this kind of waste in America, and it all has value — if only we can find it. The problem, of course, is that the records describing what this stuff is were not passed on to us when we bought it the stuff. To sell it, we have to effectively recreate those records, and that labour is expensive. It’s hard to get motivated to tag things manually. What we need that data stored with the object, and transmitted seamlessly to all future users. Mattereum Asset Passports do this, of course. Mattereum’s system will aggregate expert opinions about objects for ease of consultation, too. We have a new mechanism for incentivizing these experts to put in the time and energy that it takes to express their opinions clearly. If accomplished guitarists can weigh in with their opinions of how a particular guitar fares as a beginner’s instrument, for example, consumers can wade through the advertising hype and get informed answers to the questions they’re really asking when deciding what to buy. Now we are paying people for real information, rather than to stand next to things and pose with them. But everyone going out and buying their own stuff just to try out is just part of what got us into our current situation in the first place. If we think of our personal caches of underutilised goods as a sort of poorly organised matter network, of which our closets and garages are just one node, then we can begin to organise this network to make the best use of a wealth of untapped resources in each other’s own backyards. Look up the kit that is the best match for what you’re looking for, and then rent or buy it from your neighbour up the road who has one going spare. We need clear descriptions of what things are, and we need search for the physical world . If all of these goods were in the Mattereum ecosystem, then the groundwork is laid for both an efficient sharing economy as well as an agile market for second hand goods. It all bedrocks on to the same need for information tied to individual physical objects: what is this thing, and what is it really good for? If we have the facts, we can design algorithms to optimize the allocation of capital (and goods) in our lives. It’s a straight forwards big data problem. And this is good news not just for consumers, but for producers. If there is a robust, healthy, friction-free secondary market for guitars, cameras, bicycles, even cars, people are much more

[passage 16](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/how-post-industrial-capitalism-and-a-new-type-of-big-data-will-save-the-planet-6574b1d75bf6) good for? If we have the facts, we can design algorithms to optimize the allocation of capital (and goods) in our lives. It’s a straight forwards big data problem. And this is good news not just for consumers, but for producers. If there is a robust, healthy, friction-free secondary market for guitars, cameras, bicycles, even cars, people are much more likely to buy the best they can afford knowing full-well they can easily resell it at a fair price as soon as a better model comes out, or they no longer need it. Many professional photographers, for example, operate this way already. They use the best possible equipment and upgrade almost automatically when better gear comes out, because there’s good enough liquidity in the second hand markets for good quality cameras that they are taking very little risk buying new, high quality equipment . Good for Nikon, good for Canon, good for Sony, and the photographer, and the people buying their photographs. Efficient secondary markets are nobody’s enemy: they just increase the average quality of goods available to everybody. Only the real trash gets pushed out of having value by efficient markets. To make this vision come true, we need a new category of software. EAP: Enterprise Resource Planning for the People The production systems of the world run on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, of which SAP and Oracle are probably the two best-known examples. Similar systems exist in the world of finance to manage capital inside of banks, and to allocate resources in private equity firms. This is the software which runs civilization’s arteries and veins, its digestive system and its lungs. It’s the nervous system of industrial capitalism, and without it, we would almost all be destitute. But these systems are corporate, intimately tied to the investment and production phases of society, but only very weakly tied to consumption and waste management. They are, essentially, direct descendants of the mainframe paradigm: one big computer that rules the whole organization. And these systems interoperate only with great reluctance; the world is not run by a big, interwoven, interoperable mesh of big ERP systems seamlessly talking to each-other to make optimal decisions. It’s all still largely stuck in the mainframe phase, on arcane standards that are impossible to parse, and worse to debug. In short, these systems are due for an upgrade. What we need is ERP for the People. We need smaller, more flexible software systems to help individuals manage the same kinds of tasks that ERP systems handle: physical assets, time, money, commitments and more, as integrated systems. We would all really benefit from having tools that bring the power of knowing what you’ve got, where you have it, what you paid for it, and what it’s worth to somebody else right now. Imagine how much it would change if it was all at our fingertips in a series of dapps which help us optimize our personal relationship with matter itself, mediated by the marketplaces we all

[passage 17](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/how-post-industrial-capitalism-and-a-new-type-of-big-data-will-save-the-planet-6574b1d75bf6) bring the power of knowing what you’ve got, where you have it, what you paid for it, and what it’s worth to somebody else right now. Imagine how much it would change if it was all at our fingertips in a series of dapps which help us optimize our personal relationship with matter itself, mediated by the marketplaces we all participate in, plus new marketplaces for information about the quality, provenance and value of physical objects. Our working title for this model is Effective Abundance Platforms : platforms which help us manage our relationship to the abundance that industrial capitalism produces , while optimising the hell out of the inefficient capital allocation mechanisms which are represented by error-prone purchasing and reselling behavior among consumers. It’s clean, it’s green, and we think, with Mattereum in the lead, it could be extremely profitable as a new class of businesses. Mattereum helps sellers get full value from their goods Our core argument is that today everything is underpriced because buyers are constantly hedging against imperfect information. All purchasing decisions are impacted by imperfect informtion: in short, that all markets are “ lemon markets ” and consumers respond by paying less for things than they would if they had perfect information about the offer. Even if the thing consumers buy is perfectly described, they can still be hurt by what they don’t know: there was a better one available, or a better one is due to be released next month. We are constantly trying to lowball our purchases to manage the risk of making mistakes based on imperfect information, and this badly hurts sellers who just want to get paid for making stuff. This psychology applies as much to houses, cars, and industrial machinery as it does to consumer goods and trinkets. Fear-based behavior from buyers reduces overall economic efficiency in a number of ways. For example, buyers will: Trade at a discount from perceived value (expensive things are cheap on eBay partly because buyers do not trust what they are buying will be what they receive, so prices are depressed) Hesitate (reducing liquidity and harming cash flows) Introduce expensive middle men to reduce risk (for example, multiple third parties in a real estate deal exist to certify facts about the house to the buyer, and all their fees reduce the price the seller can feasibly charge for the house) Increase “trade gravity” (people tend to trade with people they are culturally close to, rather than the ones it is economically most efficient to trade with if we ignore cultural factors because we imagine we have more control when dealing with neighbours) Buy from brands at a premium because they trust the brand on matters like quality assurance, design, and fitness for purpose (premium price behavior) All of this is economic inefficiency which can be squeezed out of the global trade system if we can use technology to reduce the uncertainty of trade. Better information leads to more efficient markets, and higher prices for

[passage 18](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/how-post-industrial-capitalism-and-a-new-type-of-big-data-will-save-the-planet-6574b1d75bf6) brands at a premium because they trust the brand on matters like quality assurance, design, and fitness for purpose (premium price behavior) All of this is economic inefficiency which can be squeezed out of the global trade system if we can use technology to reduce the uncertainty of trade. Better information leads to more efficient markets, and higher prices for assets with higher resolution data. Mattereum Asset Passports help asset owners to get full value for their physical objects by removing all the doubt and friction associated with the buying and selling of material things. All of these sources of friction and uncertainty can be removed or at least lessened. If you put yourself in the position of a purchaser: do you want to buy the goods with shoddy, inaccurate, vague information with no guarantees of accuracy, or do you want to pay a higher price for an iron-clad guarantee that you will get what you pay for? The premium for removing the risk from purchase transactions could be as high as 20% in some markets. We know this approach works, because 60 years ago VISA changed the world specifically by reducing buyer risk VISA is an august institution. It is much older than most people think: it was started in 1958. VISA’s history is absolutely fascinating, and extremely clear, precise and bold visions of the future powered VISA’s expansion and growth to world domination. VISA, as an organization, is probably the closest precursor to blockchain technology. It exists to enable trade, globally, and does so by mitigating a set of risks which make it harder for people to buy and sell across the world. While it did not have the explicit political vision of Bitcoin, still the world that VISA seemed to be creating in the early days was much the same world: endlessly fluid, seamless, point to point transactions around the globe. That was the vision, anyway. One of the key contributors to the success of VISA is their comprehensive strategy for reducing perceived consumer risk when using VISA to make payments. By providing risk mitigation for buyers living with uncertainty, VISA does succeed in facilitating global trade, particularly on the internet. Because VISA charges such a high fee (2%+) and has massive market power, they can afford to provide dispute resolution to buyers, and enforce sanctions on sellers (the infamous chargeback ), in essence acting as a global small claims court. Relative to small businesses who are dependent on being able to accept VISA cards to continue in business, VISA is parasovereign. Access to justice on even such a rough-and-ready basis as VISA’s customer service reduces a buyer’s perceived risk, so people will pay for goods online with credit cards knowing that if they are defrauded they can get their money back, with the entire system being governed and overseen by VISA, Mastercard, and their peers (at a B2B level, including SWIFT.) This dispute resolution plus insurance package is extremely powerful for getting trade to happen where

[passage 19](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/how-post-industrial-capitalism-and-a-new-type-of-big-data-will-save-the-planet-6574b1d75bf6) buyer’s perceived risk, so people will pay for goods online with credit cards knowing that if they are defrauded they can get their money back, with the entire system being governed and overseen by VISA, Mastercard, and their peers (at a B2B level, including SWIFT.) This dispute resolution plus insurance package is extremely powerful for getting trade to happen where it otherwise would not, specifically because it protects buyers from a range of risks, including some classes of information inequality. VISA makes its living from sellers’ willingness to pay high transaction fees; their increase in total transaction volume from accepting VISA more than compensates for the transaction fees VISA charges on those transactions. This covers many inaccuracies in product descriptions; people can always say “goods were the wrong color, accept my product return or I will call VISA to arrange a chargeback.” But if we could create the right kind of markets for truth about those facts, we could eliminate those errors, and correspondingly reduce global transactional friction . There’s no reason that objects should not ship with an accurate color measurement, and plenty of third parties with color testing gear exist. We should never be guessing about things like color matching or product sizing. We have the technology, we just don’t have developed markets to make the information cheaply available to the people that need it. VISA facilitates global trade by reducing the risk of international transaction VISA, and all other money transmission systems that offer bundled services, makes a living by getting trade to happen where trade would otherwise not. It provides a bundle of services to make this happen. The power of the blockchain allows bundles of services like VISA’s to be disaggregated into marketplaces, leaving a decentralized, competitive marketplace where component services can be assembled into a system more efficient and powerful than the existing financial architecture has ever been. This is significantly beyond the scope of this article, but it’s news to nobody: including VISA. VISA itself recognizes the potential transformative power of the blockchain. The new VISA B2B Connect service uses Hyperledger to make more efficient international payments a reality, in theory competing with SWIFT. But a reasonably well designed blockchain trade system need not differentiate between B2B, B2C and P2P users; the underlying technology is secure enough to handle all users on the same backbone, as is natural to the decentralized paradigm. All of these technical trends converge on the same vanishing point: a world in which money flows around the world as easily as information. Mattereum thinks that model is likely to be broader: information, money, goods and services will flow around the world as easily as information. But to get there, it’s important to understand how VISA operates, and what lessons it has for us as we come to our core challenge: redesigning the global economy so we have a planet worth living on in a hundred years. VISA and the blockchain Now let’s look at VISA in more depth to

[passage 20](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/how-post-industrial-capitalism-and-a-new-type-of-big-data-will-save-the-planet-6574b1d75bf6) the world as easily as information. But to get there, it’s important to understand how VISA operates, and what lessons it has for us as we come to our core challenge: redesigning the global economy so we have a planet worth living on in a hundred years. VISA and the blockchain Now let’s look at VISA in more depth to understand how they have become such a massive global financial infrastructure player. The VISA model bundles six services: Identity (for both buyer and seller) Credit Currency conversion Payment rail Dispute resolution Transaction insurance The blockchain ecosystem is building out a service architecture which roughly parallels VISA’s categories of functions: Identity (Sovrin, uPort, Civic, Mattereum) Credit (MakerDAO, Ethlend) Currency conversion (exchanges, Bancor) Payment rail (Bitcoin, Ether, DAI from MakerDAO) Dispute resolution (Mattereum) Transaction insurance (Mattereum, Etherisc) So the argument can be made here that the blockchain community are building out a “decentralized VISA.” Not an unworthy goal, as VISA and Mastercard equal upwards of $30 billion of revenue per year on more than $10 trillion of transactions. Additionally, given that blockchain payments are generally considered to be non-reversible, some businesses may greatly prefer blockchain payment solutions to address the problem of unreliable invoicing. However, the credit card paradigm does not touch vast areas of payments; mortgages, B2B transactions (perhaps 4 times the size of the B2C economy) and larger payments in general are out of scope for the credit card. But the emerging DeFi (“decentralized finance”) model does not distinguish between B2B and B2C services, and fully supports P2P transactions on exactly the same basis. It’s all one. The new emerging architecture is scale-free: trade is trade is trade. There’s another source of trouble in the existing system that the new system will fix: human error. High error rates, manual re-keying of invoice details, lack of any kind of meaningful “API economy” for automated provisioning of goods and services and so on adds up to a much larger opportunity than competing for the credit card in B2C financial transactions.The entire process of invoicing and processing large transactions is in desperate need of optimisation. SWIFT processes over $5 trillion per day, (at far lower margins than VISA, of course). But all of those transactions will be associated with labyrinthine internal bureaucracies, fundamentally ruled by the big four audit companies who make a living unpicking the natural errors — and occasional frauds — that occur when you have humans in the loop manually entering invoices into databases. Imagine the transformation possible in this space as precise, clear, machine-readable descriptions of goods and services (backed by guarantees linked to escrowed funds, for example) reduce the error rates on these transactions to near-zero over time. The trajectory for the blockchain industry has to be towards automating error-free B2B, B2C and P2P transactions, using triple entry bookkeeping concepts to unpick the invoicing maze and cleaning up the manual processes which exists at the boundary between almost all large organizations. Putting B2B, B2C, and P2P transactions on

[passage 21](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/how-post-industrial-capitalism-and-a-new-type-of-big-data-will-save-the-planet-6574b1d75bf6) the error rates on these transactions to near-zero over time. The trajectory for the blockchain industry has to be towards automating error-free B2B, B2C and P2P transactions, using triple entry bookkeeping concepts to unpick the invoicing maze and cleaning up the manual processes which exists at the boundary between almost all large organizations. Putting B2B, B2C, and P2P transactions on exactly the same backbones, and reducing the friction of operating over international boundaries to near zero is going to unlock genuinely world-changing amounts of wealth. And we need to squeeze every last grain of efficiency that we can out of the global economy, because people are still hungry, and structural waste on a finite planet is the enemy of everything that lives. If the internet has a purpose, if the blockchain has a purpose, this has to be part of it: we aren’t just fighting against authoritarianism, we are also fighting against entropy. Food rotting in the back of the warehouses does not have to happen. We just need efficient systems to connect hunger to food, and at least half of that problem is just bad software which harms the sellers as much as the hungry buyers. We are all on the same side against waste, and bad software. It’s all of us, against entropy. Where does Mattereum fit in? Mattereum started to create a “ supreme court of the internet ” for hearing disputes related to the use of Ethereum and other smart contracts in real world trade. This business model uses the provisions of the 1958 New York Convention on Arbitration to establish a private court which users can opt in to for their dispute resolution by including simple boilerplate text in their contracts. We saw this (and still do!) as a vital missing component in getting world trade on to the blockchain platforms that are emerging. Many such specialized courts already exist for industries like construction or ship-building, handling hundreds of billions of dollars of disputes every year, so why not for the blockchain space? Most of our innovations in this area relate to technical evidence handling, court procedures, and cost control. Importantly, the awards made by courts of this type are easily enforced internationally. But blockchain adoption in the real world has been slow , and the dispute volume to support such a court does not exist yet. We were a little early. We then pivot Mattereum into its second phase: the initial arbitration-centric “supreme court of the internet” model, which is well-suited to providing legally binding dispute resolution services for large volume commercial transactions, pivots to become the “smart property register”, in which we figured out how to apply these concepts to much smaller transactions by narrowing focus to a specific subset of disputes: disputes about the authenticity or qualities of a physical object. Mattereum does this by taking a whole set of disputes about point-of-fact issues, and moves them out of litigation-style dispute resolution — adversarial, multiple parties, win-lose, complex burden of proof type

[passage 22](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/how-post-industrial-capitalism-and-a-new-type-of-big-data-will-save-the-planet-6574b1d75bf6) out how to apply these concepts to much smaller transactions by narrowing focus to a specific subset of disputes: disputes about the authenticity or qualities of a physical object. Mattereum does this by taking a whole set of disputes about point-of-fact issues, and moves them out of litigation-style dispute resolution — adversarial, multiple parties, win-lose, complex burden of proof type decision-making, fault-finding etc. — to insurance claim style dispute resolution. We accept that insuring against the damage done by human error and occasional low-level fraud is necessary for function in the real world. Trade needs this. VISA proved that. We then narrow focus further to the first component of the Smart Property Register: the Mattereum Asset Passport, which is essentially a Self Sovereign Digital Identity for a physical object. An Asset Passport will usually include a Digital Twin of the object. An enormous number of disputes in the real world are about the attributes of objects purchased, including secondary situational factors like delivery time. But the basic dispute frameworks are that the thing was not as described, or thing was not fit for purpose and has to be returned or revalued. Accurate, truthful, complete information wipes out entire sets of disputes, bringing down the overall system costs for dispute resolution across all trade. It is like the difference between doing business in a clean vs. a corrupt economy: there’s a threshold past which things just get easy, and the economy really beings to fly . That’s what we envisage doing for the trade in physical assets. The more we can get people to tell the truth about their offers, the more efficiently the overall economy runs. We have to reshape the incentive landscape to get full disclosure about products, and the Mattereum Asset Passport achieves this. Essentially, we want a paradigm where, when something goes wrong, people do the equivalent of swapping insurer information, and moving on with their day. We want a situation in which the normal accidents of everyday trade can be covered at a financial level, without requiring complex dispute resolution procedures in cases without contentious dispute. Ideally such a system should punish attempted fraud, rather than reward it — and for that to work, the burden of proof must be very precisely positioned not to create pathological incentives . We feel our design achieves this. Mattereum’s business model depends on the research, development, and service design we did during this phase. The arbitration model we built to provide relatively affordable global dispute resolution for smart contracts also backs up the dispute resolution mechanisms used in the smart property register. Small disputes are handled using an insurance-type model, and larger disputes or problematic misrepresentations are escalated to our other dispute resolution forums. Without this model, disputes about blockchain smart contracts and oracles would have to be handled in regular courts, which would be unfeasibly slow and expensive. Justice has to be fast and economical if it is going to support a low transaction cost blockchain economy. High

[passage 23](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/how-post-industrial-capitalism-and-a-new-type-of-big-data-will-save-the-planet-6574b1d75bf6) model, and larger disputes or problematic misrepresentations are escalated to our other dispute resolution forums. Without this model, disputes about blockchain smart contracts and oracles would have to be handled in regular courts, which would be unfeasibly slow and expensive. Justice has to be fast and economical if it is going to support a low transaction cost blockchain economy. High resolution information and fine-grained property rights will transform how markets work One critical area of uncertainty, which adds friction to trade, is uncertainty about product specifications, both for newly manufactured goods, and especially for secondary markets like eBay. We have accumulated near-infinite data about people and their behavior in the past 20 years, far, far more than is really safe, necessary, or appropriate. However, we have singularly failed to make a similar accumulation of data about products; neither Amazon nor eBay currently permit me to shop for a laptop by a specific port configuration (“full sized HDMI port, two USB 3.1 ports, ethernet port”) never mind by the force-distance profile of the laptop keys to tell how it will feel to type on it. We still can’t buy clothes that fit, online. These benefits of high resolution product information will be combinatorial. Why should I have to guess whether a TV will fit in the back of a car before I physically pick it up and try? The data exists: every one of these objects had a digital representation that it was manufactured from, but the data disconnects in the economy just cause massive inefficiencies at every hand and turn, because I can’t get to that data without massive efforts. Why? Why can’t I tell Uber the size of the TV set I want to move, and have their software automatically provision the right car for me? And if that kind of data is good for consumers, what about for freight haulers? What about for people packing aeroplanes? The “ Digital Twin ” paradigm will become the standard to which everything is produced. We should always be able to access a high resolution digital copy of our property — size, shape, materials, functional properties, and so on — so that we can always access complete information about what we own. That information combines with other information to offer new, radical, exciting services. It will be like GPS all over again, or like Mobile itself. Exhilarating, expansive changes in how the world works, right in our hands. Mattereum will establish the new market paradigm to get those digital twins built, bottom-up and grass roots style where necessary. Once we have those digital twins, we can start automatically searching for synergies in matter: what fits with what, what interoperates with what, what will match what. Color, size, shape, fit, technical standards, you name it. Matter is worth more once it is searchable, and computers can figure out its affordances for us. “Yes, this TV will fit in the back of your car.” I’d pay to know that before I picked it up.

[passage 24](https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/how-post-industrial-capitalism-and-a-new-type-of-big-data-will-save-the-planet-6574b1d75bf6) matter: what fits with what, what interoperates with what, what will match what. Color, size, shape, fit, technical standards, you name it. Matter is worth more once it is searchable, and computers can figure out its affordances for us. “Yes, this TV will fit in the back of your car.” I’d pay to know that before I picked it up. So would you. We do this kind of stuff for cars, we do it for aeroplanes and aeroplane parts. We know it can work in some markets, and increased computer power and better software allow us to do it for a much broader range of things than previously. We can find the metadata for all the world’s objects, and put it online. The rest is details, really. That’s the core goal. We use information markets to reach it. We get the matter under computer control so that we can use algorithms to efficiently allocate it where people need it most: markets, but fully informed transparent markets. Optimal markets. More than ever we have to stretch global resources: more people with more demands for more things, on a planet that is already creaking from ecological strain. Better information means better decisions, lower friction, and reduced risk. It means more efficient rental and second-hand markets, efficient enough that they may explode into a whole new kind of utility (think Uber and AirBnb), and all this adds up to a more efficient fundamental economy. There is no reason for archaic property rights norms, established in the medieval or pre-medieval period to serve a struggling 21st century society properly. We need to make matter work more like information. Instead, we need a vastly more liquid system of property rights. Not simply tokenization and securitization of the ownership of assets, but a transformed relationship with matter: automated scheduling and provisioning, open options (“I need a sewing machine for two days any time in the next six weeks”) and so on. We can stretch existing capital assets to serve many, many more people. This serves both commercial and ecological imperatives. Introducing the Mattereum Asset Passport So, when all is said and done, all theory aside, what does it do? The Mattereum process is three parts: Asset Passports, Automated Custodians, and the Smart Property Register. The Automated Custodian is the technical/legal machinery for doing instant property ownership transfer almost anywhere in the world: an atomic swap for property. We aren’t there yet, but we are working hard on it. The Smart Property Register is for contract composability: it’s how you’d put your house into a pool for a Blockchain Airbnb based on sublease clauses in your rental contracts. Again, that’s over the horizon: the defi ecosystem has to mature a bit before that has genuine utility, although MakerDAO’s ecosystem is rapidly approaching the point where this functionality would be useful! So that leaves the Mattereum Asset Passport, our first product. What is the Mattereum Asset Passport? It’s a domain name for physical matter. Is is the abstraction

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/165-3.md (part 3 of 3).
End of [165] The Mattereum Manifesto: green capitalism, product information markets, and the blockchain, part 2 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.