# Tokenizing All The Gold in The World > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [541]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: video, 2025-06-03 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMZt8akLd1A. Text: automatic captions, mostly corrected - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024), the latest step. - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Object identity in the contracting layer. - Career works it belongs to: - The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out of ideas (2010): One-page paper: the richest fifth are eating the planet, so the next economy has to be at peace with other... (suggested by machine) - 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) - Spiral economy (2023): Economic idea: keep goods whole and route them down through tighter budgets. (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) - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (through a work suggested by machine) - Topics: Gold, stablecoins & asset backing (50%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: stablecoins (1 here; 26 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); digital identity (1 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2006) - Importance: core-text score 0.11 (1.00 is the top), number 542 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - On the same works, just before: [546] [Marrying the Real and the Cryptographic world together (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/546.md); [819] Climate Projections 2: A lot of very boring graphs which... (2025); [231] [Chit Chat With the Nightmare Destroyer (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/231.md) - On the same works, just after: [529] [Governance On-Chain (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/529.md); [530] [Transforming Real Estate (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/530.md); [534] [Real Estate is Next for Digitization (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/534.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: Tokenizing All The Gold in The World, video, 2025-06-03, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMZt8akLd1A; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [541], https://guptaoption.com/texts/541.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMZt8akLd1A&t=0s) So, uh, I I want to suggest that this is actually kind of an identity question at heart, right? The, uh, the confusion with gold is that we've got an enormous amount of gold and most of that gold has no possible digital identity. You know, if you have gold coins on a ledger, exactly which coins are in the vault is unknowable because the coins are not IDed, unless you start putting the coins into individual little plastic bags and every bag has a number on the outside of it, and it's like numismatic gold. Um, same thing with gold bars. You know, they come in either numbered or unnumbered forms, allocated or unallocated. And all of this stuff is just you can't get a digital handle on a gold without doing a bunch of additional work. And it's all about like the difference between bicycles and cars. Bicycles generally speaking don't have any kind of durable identity. Cars are very very very strongly identified by the state. And that distinction between property with identity and property without identity is gigantic because property with identity can then be financialized in various ways. It's easier to insure. It's easier to manage from the perspective of preventing fraud. All the rest of that kind of stuff. So if we ask the question you know like out of the uh how much gold is there in the world? Is it $2 trillion of gold? Out of the $2 trillion of gold in the world probably a quarter of it is in the form of numbered allocated bars. Maybe somebody from the gold industry could give you a more accurate estimate. But if you sort of think in terms of like $500 billion of gold that is currently hard to move around in a digital form but could be assigned an identity and made tradable. You know, it's pretty clear that that is a very very substantive asset class and it's much more important than stablecoins because the value of the US dollar is super super super fragile right now. If this tariff thing goes wrong and they wind up killing the dollar, you know, the dollar winds up worth 30 cents, you wind up with hyperinflation. You know, the US pays back its national debt for 20% of the price of paying off the national debt before the dollar collapsed. Everybody goes through 18 months of hell in a hand basket and the America America comes back like a lion. That's the kind of situation where you wind up with gold at kind of 105$20,000 and in that environment you're just going to wind up tokenizing all the gold that you can because gold will be money again. Uh so I think this is all you know extremely high stakes poker and making gold tradable is a very [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMZt8akLd1A&t=150s) radical move in a time this radical. --- End of [541] Tokenizing All The Gold in The World. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [529](https://guptaoption.com/texts/529.md) Governance On-Chain (2025); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.