# Mattereum panel at the Internet of Agreements conference (part 2 of 2) > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [633], part 2 of 2. 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, 2018-04-06 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw. 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): The contracting layer applied to world trade. - Career works it belongs to: - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (suggested by machine) - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine) - Internet of Agreements (2017): Paper at the World Government Summit in Dubai on producing legal agreements at industrial scale. (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) - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine) - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine) - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine) - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (through a work suggested by machine) - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine) - 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: Internet of Agreements - Topics: Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (20%); Smart contracts, law & arbitration (14%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Ricardian contract (4 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); contracts (22 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); scenario planning (2 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); Delaware (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); dispute resolution (4 here; 48 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); world trade (2 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); smart contracts (7 here; 110 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); real assets (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); global trade (2 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); legal status (1 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2012) - The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): Delaware - Importance: core-text score 0.23 (1.00 is the top), number 336 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 0.95) - [567] [The Fourth Mattereum Physical Asset NFT Meetup 8th Feb 2023 (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/567.md): close in content (cosine 0.95) - On the same works, just before: [837] [23 Feb 18 Trade – Internet of Agreements (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/837.md); [713] [Vinay Gupta on identity, starting a fund, internet court... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/713.md); [635] [Ian Grigg (Chamapesa) and Vinay Gupta (Mattereum) on... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/635.md) - On the same works, just after: [729] [Blockchaingers Hackathon 2018 - Interview with Vinay... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/729.md); [632] Law and Global Trade in the Era of Blockchain (2018); [835] [10 Apr 18 Identity – Internet of Agreements (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/835.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: Mattereum panel at the Internet of Agreements conference, video, 2018-04-06, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [633], https://guptaoption.com/texts/633.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages, part 2 of 2 [42:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=2573s) specifically in terms of the stuff that you did for the BBC just how you get web style technologies into these big institutions I mean a lot of my early sort of thinking about smart contracts in particular came because I was working at the time with the BBC on a large scale project to digitize a lot of the rights management for commercial purposes and this dis involved you know going through the BBC archives and basically taking all of these old pieces of footage the video had been digitized for years but the contractual rights had never been digitized and so the the challenge there was was you know going through old filing cabinets and pulling out pieces of paper from the 1970s and working out what the implications were of this contract that had been drafted and signed with no knowledge of the concept of streaming and download for streaming and downloading things you know what is that what does this actually mean who do we need to pay and how much do we need to pay him how long can we put this thing online for and you know thoughts those challenges are actually in many respects their more serious than the straightforward engineering challenge you know building the front end on the thing was not very hard building a system that could take clean data and serve it up to end customers was not very hard getting the clean data into the system in the right format and figuring out how to structure that that was hard and a lot of my early thinking on smart contracts when I first came along when I first came across the area was it wouldn't it be a great system for or doing all of these things that we've been doing you know think about settlement of I think of these spirits between actors and directors and production companies and all of these kinds of things there's a sort of thing that the smart contracts are theoretically very well-suited to and then you realize how many transactions you can do per second on a public blockchain and you realize that that kind of thing is completely unfeasible right now but you know that is a thing that shift year by year by year and very very suddenly you'll find it becomes possible and it will become possible almost overnight and the difficulty I think is that you've got to start now and you know venire mentions the thoughts of Oracle and so on you know if you are a large organization I mean if you're a large media organization for instance there probably is a blockchain smart contract future for your [45:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=2723s) organization at some point you're going to face that the thing is you know do you start now or do you wait for the technology to be ready and history kind of shows us that waiting until the technology is ready typically is waiting until it's too late you get disrupted by someone who comes up underneath you so there is this this kind of interesting period now where people are kind of circling around these questions there's a lot of PLC's there's a lot of pilot projects and I think it's easy to kind of look at that and think they're not putting that much real value over it but this really is the forerunner of the thing that's going to come next I think you know companies that have survived the internet the original disruption of the web have done so because they learn to adapt really quickly those organizations are going to see blockchain coming and I go adapt in pretty much the same kind of way so I think you know their suppliers their vendors that the big you know technology companies are themselves going to have to get into that game because it's going it's it's the only way they can be able to keep their own clients at business once that disruption comes along you know if you're selling the old tools to companies of being disrupted by the new tools that's a doubly bad situation for you to be due if you don't talk a little bit [46:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=2796s) about a government at option and those processes because then that's also a very sharp point in terms of those adaptation pursuit like sure so the reason I'm talking about this is that before joining Metiria my was working at the Ministry of Justice as a Technical Architect and certainly our government lots of other governments with different degrees of enthusiasm are very keen that they're not seen to be on the back foot with these technologies that blockchain is clearly a very interesting technology and what nobody wants is in his time some polarization to go why haven't you been thinking about this on the other hand the fundamental attributes of blockchains distributed ledger technologies that make them useful is distribution of trust we talked a lot about Trust lessness this morning blockchain technologies are when multiple actors who don't necessarily trust each other terribly much in the case of nation state governments the government is the central trusted authority there isn't really a lot of point having blockchain tech for many of the things the government does because the government is trusted so that's partly why I think there's potentially less interesting in blockchain taking government than one might expect on the other hand there are for those cases where there is distribution of trust as certainly in in looking at these technologies but at the same time government moves very very slowly as we all know and I think we will see developments in the private sector much more quickly than we will in government and then those will sort of backfill into government as happens with with lots of other technological shifts and digital evidence stuff or so one area that and let me be very clear that I'm not saying anything that is in any way government policy or for my as a live application but there is a lot of interest certainly in the MOJ and across other departments and government about a potential use of blockchain technology as essentially a digital evidence log [49:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=2946s) such that if you have so a particular case in point at the moment is communication service provider data where in a criminal case you the police might have gone to Vodafone and said hey we've arrested this guy we need to know where he's been and who he's been calling and the service provider can provide a log of all these calls there is a lot of interest in the hydrant using a blockchain to store the hash of that artifact whatever it is whether it's a indication or image or a piece of digital video to write the hash to a blockchain and such that you can then go and point it and say in six months time when you present the evidence in court look here is this thing you can compare against this hash on the blockchain and it cannot possibly have been tampered with and this is actually oddly enough not a new idea there used to be vaguely similar cases where the proof that the thing was as it as you said it was is because they'd publish certain hash numbers in the times and you can actually go back to the times and verify details of exactly what the our sites were on and but it turns out that this concept is is it's quite interesting government there is there is some work in exploring how that could be used it also transpires that exactly the same concept can actually be very useful in contract negotiations ticketing arbitration where if the two parties who have a dispute go to a mediator or a qualified arbitrator and both of them have a thick pile of documents to say look this is exactly what happened that that can massively streamline and simplify the whole dispute resolution process which I hope I'm like Chris is sort of vaguely nodding so I think I'm sure you'll correct me in a minute so yeah in certainly in government I think the applications of blockchain technology are not perhaps quite as widespread as we might have thought but there is a lot of interest in particular niches where distribution Trust is an issue yeah and this this is a wonderful idea to borrow for civil civil proceedings from I think one of the things in we we touched on in the legal panel earlier but didn't say too much about was this sort of gap where a president you have disputes which are affect you have contracts which are effectively unenforceable because the the cost of [51:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=3096s) effort to enforce it is too great relative to what you would what you would gain from doing so and you know even with some if some recoverability of your cost is built in it's never complete so there's this sort of window where you're well above the small claims retail level kind of disputes but you're well below the multimillion-dollar disputes where of course it makes sense for both parties to you know have a full-blown arbitration with with all the trimmings now this is where I think this kind of technological application can be useful in from a really trim trim cost and time I think you will still end up if you're at a full of arbitration of course there will still be the traditional witness statements people swearing on oath that such and such evidence was indeed the document that they send at that particular time that's still going to happen when you when you have full hearings but for lower value disputes and earlier stages this prospect of having a clearer chronology of events as they unfolded to the contract and pieces of evidence that were thrown up at the time and it it may be a bill of lading it may be a notice email by email from one part to the other but certain things are hashed and those hash to put on a chain and the idea that you could very quickly have a third party neutral come in and look at a set of documents which they know are the documents that were exchanged at those times or at those times that's that's a real kind of boring but really meaningful efficiency saving I think it's important [53:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=3212s) to put this in the context of risk anytime something goes wrong and a piece of trade that are associated costs of recoverability and they spread across all of the transactions that you're doing so all stuff all the risk increases friction the friction reduces the number of trades you can make which are profitable and it all shrinks the size of global GDP you know just getting the barriers to international trade down using mechanisms which don't rely on international treaties is potentially a much larger counterbalance to the ongoing slowdown that we're seeing in global trade than almost any other single thing we could do if you think about how effectively access to information it's been transformed by the Internet in the last 20 years it's something that impractical to imagine that you could see something similar hopping from and that process is already well underway with for example Amazon Amazon as what gating is to look like when you see this kind of fluidization of training imagine if that was true for everything else at the same time and Peter you had a question yeah I had an [54:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=3277s) observation I was very pleased to hear Rob bring up the subject of culture particularly the collision of culture between legal and technical and entrepreneurial I had a situation in Italy years ago where an entrepreneur wanted to use a gigantic Italian company to move shitloads of his product and we had a informal Memorandum of Understanding I of understanding I negotiated you know the a for scrap of paper we agree that this that and the other then he brought his lawyer and the lawyer had set him up with the Delaware based corporation so his focus and mindset was protecting the IP at all costs and within five minutes he completely destroyed the trust and the deal because that was the only language that he see let alone the fact that the legal system there is somewhat Napoleonic law based which is different than our system certainly different from America let alone the cultural aspect that Italians don't fight black against white their language when they express such things who uses a special tense where there's a bit of wiggle room built into the other side because it's a Bancho society Spain's the same money and you can't be seen to file as a as a male in that sort of combative environment so I think culture rub there's a fantastic element to look at on the longer term and to think about hey well what do we can do with all these other legal jurisdictions and how do they fit in on the international trade which is work where we came in right I mean this this is the unresolved business there has been all the way through the internet based around globalization yeah you know the formation of a single global internet culture around things like Wikipedia is very very far advanced but in things like international trade those cultures are going to remain you know extremely particular international for a long time and we don't really know what it means that the global trade backbone and which technically works more or less the same way everywhere but we generally will be used in completely different ways and I think you could look at what's happened with internet messaging where you see the kind of iconographic cultures give rise to emojis which eventually come get [57:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=3427s) back ported into the West it would be fascinating to see what their trade norms for another cultures came back Chao and once those channels were opened I mean what I hope we might also be able to do is overcome a cultural failing with human beings generally which is that we just don't like to think about what will happen when it goes wrong and law has been the technology that contact law that we've developed to deal with that failing you you have this class of human beings who are trained to try and constrain those risks but there are I think the kind of systems thinking design approaches that I keep referring to are much better ways scenario planning trying to map out how this dynamic system might evolve in various different directions and then anticipate and allow for what you'd like to see in those different outcomes that is something that human beings just don't do but it would be tremendously good if they did and I think that this space allows us to start imposing that discipline on on the planet absolutely so I think on that note we'll wind up the panel just one quick one two minutes two minutes to do I will keep it less than two minutes um so your your idea of neutralization of evidence so that you can keep the track of the chain of evidence and when it happened so on why is that a public blockchain in order kid hub repository or something like that why do you need the radio it rarely is that I would say going to be a public blockchain even just the hashes carry valuable metadata that you wouldn't necessarily want to reveal to a competitor just just somebody watching the timing of these hashes pop up could give them valuable intelligence so I think we're not going to see that kind of thing or the public voting okay okay that's all folks thank you very much [Applause] --- End of [633] Mattereum panel at the Internet of Agreements conference, part 2 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [729](https://guptaoption.com/texts/729.md) Blockchaingers Hackathon 2018 - Interview with Vinay... (2018); 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.