# Introducing the Internet of Agreements

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [271]. 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, 2017-01-25 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYM_H5eWoh4. 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).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Origin of the contracting layer as machine-readable law for global trade.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Internet of Agreements (2017): Paper at the World Government Summit in Dubai on producing legal agreements at industrial scale.
  - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (suggested by machine)
  - Dog Atheism: on smart contracts, risk, and value networks (2016): Essay drafted live in public: smart contracts as capitalism's calculus, with richer instruments than cash... (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.
  - 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...
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Blockchain infrastructure & theory — databases, semantics, identity & trust (64%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: English law (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); oracles (1 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); certificates (1 here; 26 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); science fiction (1 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Silicon Valley (1 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); Singapore (1 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); supply chain (2 here; 92 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); supply chains (1 here; 59 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); contracts (2 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); smart contracts (1 here; 110 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.72 (1.00 is the top), number 26 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [237] [The Internet of Agreements (Hexayurt Capital section,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/237.md): same career work: Internet of Agreements
  - [221] [Hexayurt Capital presents the Internet of Agreements™ at... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/221.md): same career work: Internet of Agreements
- On the same works, just before: [679] [FutureRant - Vinay Gupta Pt 4/4 - "Cypherpunk to Cyberpunk" (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/679.md); [227] [Dubai Mandates Blockchain-Only Government Documents By... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/227.md); [39] [Internet of Agreements (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/39.md)
- On the same works, just after: [237] [The Internet of Agreements (Hexayurt Capital section,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/237.md); [218] [Blockchain to be breakthrough tech for Dubai and... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/218.md); [221] [Hexayurt Capital presents the Internet of Agreements™ at... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/221.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: Introducing the Internet of Agreements, video, 2017-01-25, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYM_H5eWoh4; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [271], https://guptaoption.com/texts/271.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYM_H5eWoh4&t=0s) so uh let us begin so this is largely going to be a talk about regulation and the fact that inside of most of our computer systems regulation is completely invisible so I can't think of a single piece of software that attempts to build a

[0:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYM_H5eWoh4&t=20s) comprehensive map of the regulatory structure uh of the world there is no API for access to the English law there is certainly no artificially intelligent representation of that law that will help me decide whether a given Act is legal or illegal and the absence of any kind of framework for thinking about regulation in the context of something like the blockchain means that it's relatively easy to deliberately or accidentally give an illegal instruction to a blockchain system because the blockchain has no understanding of Regulation because there is no API to send a deal for a regulatory check if you're doing something for the first time you're going to need to put a human being in the loop to take a look at it and figure out whether it's legal or not and this is clearly completely excessive for the vast majority of things that you might want to do so if your objective is to do something like um you know ship um I don't know cheese to France then fairly clearly this is going to go have to go through some kind of check for food quality if that was going across a border between an EU and a non-eu state there would be a clear set of establishments and credentials that you would have to have and even a very simple system could check whether or not you have those credentials before it would allow you to go forward and you know make your transaction so right now we just don't have machine representations of the law even in areas where it would be extremely simple and my assertion is that it is necessary for us to build this because the limit on what we can automate is going to be strictly defined by our ability to figure out exactly what it is that we're doing with the regulation of these kind of spaces if we can't figure out what is legal then we cannot proceed to automate and if we can't automate the long-term impact of the blockchain is greatly

[2:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYM_H5eWoh4&t=138s) reduced the second thing is that the vast majority of the people who are early actors in the blockchain space are fairly substantially dematerialized uh they're what are often referred to as rootless Global noads you see these f drif in and out of conferences they have a single backpack that's basically everything they own in the world apart from a quarter of million dollars worth of bitcoin that lives on a USB keychain around their throat and that template is very very common in the space you can make some assertions about this being tied to autism it might also just be that these people live in a kind of hyper postmodern future but one way or another when you get to this sheer gritty nasty reality of regular regulation when you have to deal with the heavyweight deep structures of the world it's very very very hard for people to fully get their heads around that as a you know physical tangible artifact very few of the people that work in the blockchain space have ever worked in a container Port very few of them have ever had to handle Logistics so they don't have an immediate intuition for the paperwork for the heaviness of the project that they're engaged in when they start talking about doing things like applying the blockchain to a supply chain it's an enormous shift in Consciousness from a very very light almost dematerialized culture through to this very very very heavy kind of deep Bedrock of civilization and in the real world

[3:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYM_H5eWoh4&t=224s) Logistics is everything you know every single thing that we can see in this room was brought in on the back of a truck sometime in the last couple of days the walls came on a truck the chairs came on a truck you know the the stage that I'm standing on the screen you're looking at the podium all of this stuff got in and out of this building because of a logistical Network that moved it around and that logistical framework uh is more or less the target of almost all real Finance so when you finally resolve you know complicated Futures deals or even high frequency trading at some point all of that stuff will eventually collapse back down into the real world there will be a point where although somebody is buying and selling and trading gold stocks it will eventually turn into a company that digs a hole in the ground that extracts physical gold same thing if you're thinking about you know uh buying and selling shares at a stock market eventually these companies almost all either produce physical stuff or they sell things to people that produce physical stuff the media industry you think of media is being this dematerialized situation but it's not dematerialized the media is enormously dependent on things like stage sets these vast constructions hundreds of Acres on a side that are you know essential parts of building out the rest of the structure that allows you to tell the stories you want to tell so in that kind of setting if you imagine that this entire Digital World dissolves and revolves around real physical artifacts it gives you a much better feeling for what the blockchain is fundamentally for the blockchain is way of controlling the movement of physical stuff through many many many tiers and layers abstraction until you hit this kind of Bedrock hard reality at the bottom of the pile now there's an enormous amount of

[5:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYM_H5eWoh4&t=338s) thinking about blockchains and Supply chains this is a really really Common Thread and the basic conceptual the model in the abstract is that information flows one way and goods flow the other way you know uh the information is in the form of payment it's in the form of an order the goods that are moving in the other direction it's the physical stuff it might be Insurance it might be credentials attached to the physical stuff like safety certificates you know a box is manufactured in China it gets a bunch of safety certifications it's transferred to a ship it's moved along the ship with bills of lighting and so on gets to a place like Singapore an essentially robotic Port will take the containers off reallocate them onto different ships somebody will process the paperwork reload the boats and move it along and that process repeats at every point where you change jurisdiction or where you change custody of the goods until you worked your way all the way across to some loading dock in America you take the stuff off you unload it and it goes through a similar but different system to handle the Box Logistics until individual uh you know computers are individual shops that structure is well understood everybody knows the blockchain is going to be huge on in that area because the existing systems are very archaic they're very inefficient and they're more or less the only remaining manual paperwork in the global system the design the execution the ordering the payments all of that stuff is happening electronically and then you get to this very very very stubborn last little par which is the logistics system is still running on paper so we know that this stuff closes eventually but once again we hit this regulatory void if we're going to automate all of this stuff there is an element of human intelligence in handling the paperwork where somebody who's been in the business for 35 years says you can't ship bananas to Brazil they don't let anything into the country that looks like fruit or whatever the local regulation has to be you know the these nuts are you know these are imperial nuts and you're sending them to Germany there's no way this chipping is correct so that problem of embedded human intelligence all the way along the supply chain um makes it very very very hard to see and grasp and fully understand the complexity of the global logistics Network that we're operating inside of at an abstract level this is tacit implicit knowledge of the kind that knowledge managers would typically think of as being nightmarishly hard to go in there and extract but this is the knowledge the Frameworks of Regulation

[8:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYM_H5eWoh4&t=488s) the basic structures what is and isn't feasible to do that has to be extracted before you can do fully automated trade Logistics because what you want is the ability for two people to make an agreement on the internet send payment across the internet and then receive Goods in the physical world without it dropping from this pure digital environment all the way down into this mess of paperwork and remembered opinions about things we do and we don't do based on some loose kind of workman's understanding of the law that drop is going to be an enormous block to us building this kind of global automated robal Logistics Network so this is basically about completing the necessary bridge between the physical and the digital right we

[8:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYM_H5eWoh4&t=537s) start right now in a world world where digital mapping of physical space has been an enormous empowerment it's made the delivery of goods possible it's changed the way we travel it's generated things like uber all of that stuff is completely dependent on having essentially perfect digital Maps similarly we've got excellent representations of things like stocks and bonds and flows of value and transactions and cash and all the rest of that all of that Maps very neatly into computer systems blockchain or non-blockchain these are solved problems in the middle there is this enormous slab which we could term regulatory space and where we are right now is we have no good maps of regulatory space certainly not that are publicly accessible across apis certainly not that are in the form of software that you could download if you wanted to the entire regulatory space area is completely black it's Terra Incognito so as we start attempting to build automated systems that interact with the real world they're automatically going to hit this regulatory space void at which point you basically have to narrow down the transactions you're doing to a tiny subset of all possible transactions that have been handd designed by your lawyers right you take this enormous automated Trade Network you make this enormous automated Contracting and payment Network and you narrow it down to the 5% of the deals that your lawyers have approved everything else you don't know whether it's legal or illegal legitimate or illegitimate because your legal team hasn't looked at it and therefore you know nothing about it and that enormous black hole where you just have no idea what happened and you don't know what to do is the vast majority of the stuff that we actually want to execute using this kind of blockchain plus Robo Logistics Network so um a good example of this would be how you did root finding before the age of Internet maps on your phone you would sit down in front of a computer you would figure out a roote using a map you would then write the route down or print out the instructions and youd follow them exactly and if you left track you lost this is how it is navigating through regulatory space using current abstractions and current Technologies it's extremely hard to come to a conclusion about whether something is okay because we just have no maps and with no Maps you can't build automated systems to help you navigate in the seat of Regulation we are lost at se and we can't realize the full value of things like self-driving cars and Robo Logistics until we get the rest of

[11:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYM_H5eWoh4&t=687s) the way up that regulatory curve to the point where we really can't understand what the regulations say inside the context of a blockchain system so what I'm essentially suggesting is that we need a regulatory Oracle in which you could take a business uh take a transaction within that business show it to the regulatory Oracle and receive some kind of proof that this is considered to be legal by your advisers you could think of it as being due diligence but automated and without that how are we going to build the the interfaces between the blockchain and the real world in a comprehensive 360 way not possible so imagine that we take this

[12:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYM_H5eWoh4&t=727s) the rest of the way the the full extent with which one could close this Loop two human beings in a room together having a discussion about doing a deal over the course of that they agree a set of terms and then they make a verbal asent that we're going to do this if this is in an area where they're already doing a lot of deals of this format it may be a standard set of contract terms that agree to as would be for example an isda which is a very common Financial instrument which is heavily standardized the deal could then be extracted from their conversation by an AI recorded in the form of a smart contract validated and verified by humans if necessary somebody then sends a payment to that smart contract which starts a Cascade of interactions through a robo Logistics Network resulting in the delivery of a physical box every step of that logistical trade is recorded on the same uh blockchain as the original contract was agreed on and what we have is a completely seamless Loop between human speech and a change in the physical world in form of delivery of goods and services this is obviously the future that people want and it sounds like science fiction if you sort think about this for a minute you know every step in that sounds distinctly kind of sci-fi apart from the fact that it's not I do this all the time at home right Alexa buy me more printer paper an Amon has a pre-existing set of contracts with me it's got some mechanisms for catching problems if the AI makes a mistake um it has its own

[13:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYM_H5eWoh4&t=815s) Robo Logistics Grid in the form of its warehouses at the edge of the robo Logistics Grid it's still using human delivery drivers I'm sure they'll replace them as fast as they can get to them and at that point what I'm really talking about is simply taking the existing infrastructure which must exist inside of Amazon that allows it to do things like not ship alcohol to places where alcohol is forbidden you know not ship pocket knives to four-year-olds whatever it is that their system of regulations prevents people from doing country by country that's essentially the map of regulatory space the robot Logistics grid I've just described it's their ability to use robots to move their packages and the ability to put an AI front end on that that understands human intention is Alexa so all of this stuff is already here but in the blockchain world we've been so busy and so focused on the exact details of the you know initial phases where we're taking things like statutory registers and loading all of that information onto the blockchain we're taking things like smart contracts for isas we're loading all that onto the blockchain we haven't really gotten our heads above the parit and taken a broader look around uh all of the places where the blockchain Technologies could be interacting with other systems so blockchain and AI is largely unex stored blockchain and Robo Logistics is largely unexplored people are beginning to look at this stuff but where the cut Edge is uh in areas where we are not so focused on the blockchain has moved a good deal ahead in the past few years you know when Bitcoin was invented Alexa was still a pipe dream and over the course of time that it's taken Bitcoin to get as well established as it has that it's taken the blockchain to get as well established as it has artificial intelligence has gone through a total phase transition and we need to basically catch up and bring the blockchain back into the conversation with I bring the conversation between blockchain and Robotics back up to speed and we really need to look at this stuff again because actually the world has become much more sophisticated much more complicated and much more exciting than it was the last time that we really took you know a moment looked around us and saw where everything interconnect now one last bit about the economics and then I'll talk a little about the future um right now it's fairly easy to imagine a situation in which China simply does all of the world's manufacturing and Amazon does all of the world's leg in delivery and you wind up with a single Global Robo Logistics Network that has incredibly low margins

[16:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYM_H5eWoh4&t=965s) to the point where nothing can slide underneath it and is operated more or less like an electricity utility would have been 50 years previously the idea that you could see a kind of global trading platform chis which everything flows and you why would you build anything else it basically becomes kind of goods as a service you just plug in your orders stuff comes out in the same way that you plugged in your toaster electricity came out and the idea that you needed to build a competitive market for electricity was a far away Vision right so it's possible that we're heading into a direction where to all intents and purposes um the supply of physical Goods will be a natural monopoly and more or less everything in the world will be made in China and delivered by Amazon that vision of the future may or made it come to pass I think if it does come to pass it will enormously slow up both cultural and technological progress because Innovation happens at the edges and anything that becomes Monopoly shaped will eventually aify and become useless and this is particularly true where government Regulators get involved and you start with a set of common practices in business which could change when people change their minds and then these things become regulations you wind up moving at the pace of government rather than the pace of Commerce so I think it's quite important that we don't passively accept the creation of a single Logistics Monopoly at a single Manufacturing Monopoly I think it would be much more sensible for us to think about what happens if we decentralize and relocalize Manufacturing and if we operate Logistics as a commercial Market with lots of automation to enable deal creation and deal finding rather than accepting that this stuff will be done by natural monopolies and it might require some effort particularly from legislators to ensure that the kind of logistics AI transformation that were Midway through uh becomes a Marketplace and becomes a series of interlocking marketplaces rather than being run by monopolies but anti-monopoly regulation is a core function of the state it's well understood that market capitalism does not operate smoothly without some mechanism for breaking up monopolies and I don't think it's too much of an ask to the state to take effective action on making sure that we don't wind up with the logistics Monopoly in the age of self-driving cars and in that case we are going to need a good alternative to a logistics Monopoly which means that we have to take the int Ence that monopolies have about what is or is not legal inside of the space and we have to make that intelligence available on

[18:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYM_H5eWoh4&t=1115s) blockchains as oracles and in other systems there kind of API based AI calls where you could go out and check something with somebody else if you don't build those systems then what will happen is that the software which handles compliance with regulation will become the core intellectual property asset of the natural monopolies and it'll be very hard for other people to match that and as a result we will wind up with a kind of regular military Monopoly Partnership of the kind that was common in telecoms all the way through the dark years of telecoms in which there was no innovation because Bell didn't have to innovate because they owned everything and were essentially an arm of the state finally um so I should say a word about

[19:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYM_H5eWoh4&t=1154s) hex her Capital hex her capital is my current project we're investing in the intersections between lots of different Technologies to see what happens where these Technologies being cross uh we're just in the early stages of put putting together a fund it's all very exciting the basic case is that things get weird even before we get strong AI is everybody familiar with the concept of a singularity you've heard you've heard the basic idea no okay so the singularity is the idea that eventually we will be able to design an artificial intelligence program which is smart enough to design an artificial intelligence program which is better than it is and that the the second program which is better than the first program will a third program and you'll get a thing that they call runaway super intelligence and this is something that people like Elon Musk are enormously worried by the Silicon Valley kind of long range thinkers are all very panicked by this as an outcome so even before we get to that point even before we get to that discussion things are getting weird they're getting really strange if you haven't bought an Amazon Alexa they're 50 bucks you could buy it on Amazon Prime they'll deliver it to you in 2 hours plug it into your computer your home network and just have a play with it it will blow your mind right plug it into your speakers put Spotify on it you'll be surprised the delighted um that shift into technologies that we really don't understand all that well is happening very very very quickly and where those Technologies cross things get weirder and better even faster the ability to do a 2hour delivery Loop where you place an order by voice and the stuff shows up on your doorstep 2 hours later feels proper way like magic because it is proper way like magic and these kind of magical hybrids AI plus robots equal self-driving cars AI plus natural language processing plus Robo Logistics is instant delivery AI plus virtual reality will be what we don't know but I guarantee that it will be fascinating surprising and amazing when it arrives and these systems often feel completely magical the first time you interact with a system made of two technologies both of which are at breakthrough Point neither of which you understand very well it is like magic the thing operates outside of your space of your sense of the real and it hits you with the immediacy of something which is just sorcery wow where did that come from and I think that that emotional response to the world is going

[21:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYM_H5eWoh4&t=1304s) to be an increasingly large part of our relationship with technology technology is going to seem more and more and more like weird interconnected magic and less and less and less like boxes that sat under desks and hum and burn electricity uh so that's it 20 minutes thank you we have a few minutes for questions yeah

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End of [271] Introducing the Internet of Agreements. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [237](https://guptaoption.com/texts/237.md) The Internet of Agreements (Hexayurt Capital section,... (2017); the most closely related, [237](https://guptaoption.com/texts/237.md) The Internet of Agreements (Hexayurt Capital section,... (2017); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.