# Mattereum panel at the Internet of Agreements conference (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [633], part 1 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/<id>.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 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=0s) so I'm just going to do a brief introduction to kind of give you a sort of conceptual background to what materialism and what we're doing and I first like to start by explaining why what kind of problem we're solving and the question of what problem we're solving really different people asked me this and the answer tends to be pretty

[0:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=25s) different depending on the context that the people have when they ask that question so if you begin with knowledge of blockchain you start thinking about well why do we need these legal contracts on a blog Trey if you begin with knowledge of the law you think what do we need a blockchain for where does that come in and so I'm going to try and do a brief kind of history lesson of the time before blockchains existed and how people thought about how to put contracts on the Internet and why they thought it was necessary to do so we're going to go back I think it's the late 1990s which some of you will remember and in the late 1990s and people were thinking about how to set up systems of digital cache how to set up a system pretty similar to to Bitcoin where you could on the internet send money to other people with reasonably low transaction costs reasonably quickly all around the world and it was pretty obvious that in at that time you couldn't do this with dollars you couldn't do it with pounds you couldn't do it with yen the system simply hadn't been built I mean if we think that Bank IT is pretty bad now it was even worse then and it would take days and days and days for payments even within the same country and the idea of sending payments internationally with low fees and rapid transaction times was a complete

[1:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=110s) Pinetree so a bunch of people thought about how they would do this and they came to the conclusion that you could do it if you had an asset of reasonably stable value such as gold that you placed in a bank bank vault and then you issued essentially entries in a database to people that pretty much represented their share of the gold and at that point you can move those entries around in the database and that is essentially like paying someone else with money the the entries in the database have this cash like property where if I update the the database to say that ten units has gone from me to you you're on you now have money that you didn't have before and the problem with this system was how did we know that the entries in the database actually related to real gold in a bank vault somewhere and this was solved using system which is now known as the Ricardian contract and there's a whole history behind that name which you can read on the wikipedia page i'm not going to go into the history now but the Ricardian contract essentially is a ordinary legal contract that closely identifies a particular technical system and the state of that technical system at the beginning and says anything that happens inside this system when the ledger is updated when the database changes those changes have a certain meaning in the real world so the numbers in the database refer to units of gold and everybody who participates in that system signs the contract which means that we now have an agreement between all the participants as to what the database actually means and that was the only way that the database could have legal force in the real world so you make an update in the database and it effects the ownership of physical stuff in the real world that line of thinking was actually largely forgotten or largely ignored in fact once Bitcoin came along because with Bitcoin there is no real asset there is no physical bar of gold somewhere there is nothing off chain that Bitcoin refers to so if you have have a digital key and certain a certain quantity of Bitcoin that is controllable by your digital key there's no external asset to even worry about so there's a saying a phrase possession is nine-tenths of the law and with Bitcoin

[4:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=260s) if you possess the digital king that's it you have ownership and control simply by virtue of holding the key with a system that needs to refer to real assets in the physical world you might be able to update the ledger but unless you are sure that updating the ledger actually changes the ownership of the asset in the real world then you're just pushing numbers around in the computer system and there's a risk that it doesn't actually mean anything so that Ricardian contract thinking is the building block for what we are doing at Mattereum we've taken those sets of ideas and looked at how do we how do we create a system were on a blockchain you can represent physical assets and move them around with the convenience of a modern computer system but where you can refer to physical assets where in fact you can refer to non-physical assets things like intellectual property or things like future streams are value that might be that there might be earned from an investment and it's this thinking that gives us this notion of the Internet of agreement so it gives us this idea that we can have representing on a blockchain contractual rights that we can move around extremely easily that we can we can trade with each other and that we can structure increasingly complex and increasingly powerful assets agreements financial instruments of various different kinds using a combination of a legal contract and a technical system whose behavior is in conformance to the terms without an illegal contract and that I think is the

[6:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=360s) the key background to what material does we also yes um so we've got that we've got that kind of set of thinking about Ricardian contracts but it's kind of clunky it's kind of difficult I mean like who really wants to be signing a paper contract and you know how do you even how do you it doesn't sound very internet native it doesn't really sound like the way that we do things in 2018 is now having people kind of printing things out and signing with ink and so on that's awful there might have been acceptable in the nineties it's not set for now so we look at other innovations

[6:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=400s) that have occurred over the last twenty years and we've moved very much from a society that ran on cash to a society that now is largely cash less you can buy pretty much anything you want now using a credit card or for that matter Apple pay Google pay and any of the various contactless systems I can pay for things using my watch which is pretty cool and that transition that move from physical bits of paper to essentially digital systems for payment has made the life of consumers much more much more convenient but if you look at the technologies that back something like a credit card there's in fact a whole bundle of different things in there there's a whole bunch of things going on that are way more powerful and way more interesting than what you would get with cash so if you buy something you pay so for something online with a credit card and that thing doesn't turn up you have a system where you can dispute the payment you can say I paid for something and they didn't get what I paid for so you can actually get a charge back in the case of credit card payment which is something you wouldn't be able to get the cash you get in some cases extra warranty or extra insurance on the goods again you don't get that the catch you also get a form of identity so if I go on to an e-commerce site and type in my name and my address that can be checked by the merchant against the information that's held by the credit card issuer so what if we

[8:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=495s) could take those kinds of innovations and bring them to contracts so we have a situation where when you sign a contract with somebody you can verify your identity and verify the identity of both parties to the contract where you can begin to bring in insurance against the possibility that the contract isn't performed and where you can start to bring in dispute resolution which is already commonplace for legal contracts as it is we bring in a form of dispute resolution that is globally accessible all around the world could we begin to see the same kind of innovation in personal finance in business-to-business deals in global trading arrangements that we've seen in the consumer the world over the last 30 years beginning with the credit card and going through payment systems such as PayPal and stripe and that has given rise to the ecommerce era with Amazon Netflix eBay uber Airbnb and so on and so forth is there a similar level of innovation a similar level have changed that we could achieve around contracts so it becomes as easy and as frictionless to sign a mortgage agreement or a rental agreement or to structure a long-term deal for shipment of goods or for hinging of risks or for investment in new businesses could we make that as easy to do as buying something with your credit card and that is ultimately the end state that we want to get to that's ultimately what Mattereum is here to do is to make it easy to facilitate all of those things so when we talk about blockchains of world trade we really are talking about trying to facilitate trade around the world where you're making it possible for people to feel as safe and as comfortable and as convenient when they're going anywhere in the world to conduct business with anybody else in the world as they would if they were doing it as as if they were doing an ordinary consumer purchase using a credit card and that is I think as a vision something that we we think about a lot but as a set of practical steps it's something that we're just starting out on and and we've kind of want to talk a little bit more about what we've achieved so far and where we're going with that vision so I'm going to move over take my seat and we'll begin a panel discussion thank you can you swap

[10:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=640s) over the slide now okay and with intros for everyone yep I guess I'm first my name is Mihai chimpo sure I am chief for engineering Mattereum Christopher a chief legal officer Vinay Gupta co-founder Davis head of operations and I already dementia but Rob Knight co-founder so well I guess only worth talking a little bit about how we got here okay well do I have no idea why that isn't working you should be fine how's the slide going having a think okay well we'll figure out they'll figure it out all right at the meantime um so how we got here is a long and winding path because as Rob alluded to there's been literally on hypergate computers properly it who the microphone keeps coming at ya so any

[12:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=725s) better so there's virtually in this 20 year process of attempting to get computers properly integrated into trade and to get the ability to do legal transfer of property using the internet there's been generations generations of technology deployed on this but we still don't have a situation in which you can regenerate something that looks like a 90 invoice and pay using some kind of electronic currency so it's still a primitive process and with this we've come to this for a range of different backgrounds and all attempting to converge all the different things that you need to get right to enable that process to run end to end you need technology you need law you need the actual business processes you need to concept of operations you know these pieces to slot together and this is basically interdisciplinary research it's a it's the hard questions about the the boundaries between fields and the demarcations between fields that give the company the shape that it has that's why we are the shape that we are don't talk a little bit about the legal side of this Chris I mean so I think on

[13:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=793s) this interdisciplinary angle we touched on it in the panel session it it feels like there's the scope here for lawyers to to do to do more and to start to take on as I said not not coding we're really starting to think about the the architecture of the the the social system that is being created by a contract as much as the as much as the hard constraints if someone needs to enforce it with the big stick of nation state violence ultimately so I would say

[14:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=840s) already in some of the some of the early work it's it's not just law plus code but there's some kind of systems engineering systems design in there scenario planning it's starting to it it's doing what could have been done earlier I think and maybe should have been in law but you know there are certain misalignments of incentives it would be far preferable for all of the legal work to be done upfront to produce if you're going to automate performance of something and that you're gonna have a big chunk of software there that helps you carry out your promises then that chunk of software isn't going to want to change radically deal - deal so that's going to become fairly standardized which is going to push contracts towards being more standardized and so that's a constraint on freedom of contract you can map out the parameters and the still scope for negotiating depending on the parties negotiating positions and all the usual factors but that that

[15:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=915s) standardization actually now allows in fact requires upfront a thought to the system of that there comprises these parties and whatever the rights in the various assets are that will be involved in their interaction and it's it's designing that an ideally to reduce over time the number of disputes that ever arise so of course you want robust dispute resolution in place but if you start to have a virtuous feedback loop where you continually try and evolve your your contracts in your code which are carrying parties through the carrying out of their promises to one another the promises to one another then

[16:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=968s) this this becomes an opportunity if you do it right to anticipate the kind of things that can go wrong and to start to plan for the put it into the code of course there'll always be exceptions I mean it's I I don't take seriously the fact that we will in general move beyond having written legal contracts that accompany pieces of code i whole classes of smart contracts which become so ubiquitous and so reliable that i would no more have a written contract use it and I would have a written contract with a vending machine sorry next example but it's so I I do think there's a there's there's a new discipline here of the sort of legal systems think here where

[17:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=1027s) we we we map out you know just as good commercial is always always say you know we helped shape the commercial deals it's it's not just some sort of irritating formality there's input to the structure of relations that that depends on you know the parties long-term goals and values and the kind of relationships they want to construct but I think we're gonna see more of that I think this whole space is a really exciting opportunity to do a lot more of that as lawyers it's just it's going to be something that's done hand-in-hand with with software engineers

[17:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=1072s) um I will take a question a second me I don't talk a little about technical side of this we literally this week did a very large design charrette and which was really the very detailed collaboration with the legal team the programming team which really line by line analysis of a contract hair don't talk a little bit about that process about how it's different from there's a regular coding environment yeah so for I'm coming from the programming side from there the guys who write the code and it's it's been a significant mind shift for me from taking a look from a client which are sometimes vague and and turning them into the code but then going through this this legal process and collaboration the legal team it's it's a total significant mind shift

[18:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=1133s) because the coders are very eager to finish the work and I guess we're seeing a lot of projects like that in the in the crypto space but they don't do the proper diligence of to make sure that what they are doing actually makes sense and in the real world also just a a view on how much material is constructed as a company I think a parallel on how Iran must designing its companies it's very aligned in the sense that we are trying to build as much as possible in-house as a collaboration between people with coming from different backgrounds and then the entire process of delivering a client work is much much faster and much much efficient and if we can make it so that at the end we weed 99% of the bugs instead of 67 that would be amazing you had a question oh no there is one here first I would you mind please Japan in a bit it's interesting that it's a multidisciplinary panel about how lawyers who are late adopters of Technology not early adopters are going to be affected by this new ticket whether they want to or not and how might they need to be able to respond and what was the other question me how you mentioned the insight you mentioned the requirements covering process is different to conventional software development please could you talk a little bit to the process of choosing up your requirements in the Mattereum context so I'll go first open up your on three at one and Chris you you were talking about some of the new or possibly adjusted roles that lawyers might take on in this country at least there's a deep cultural background that lawyers have which doesn't come from their clients if anything what they

[21:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=1283s) what they get from their training is much more rooted in centuries of practice and then the culture of the country what new elements will they require for their new roles because obviously if that's not something one thinks about then you'll get defaults that you probably didn't want right okay I'll maybe I'll try and do the first and third questions and and so I think it's I think don't touch the bottoms hands at the top I see there's technique involved when you're dealing with multiple jurisdictions which of course you are in world trade and yes we have the luxury of deciding on our governing law with disputes gonna submitted to arbitration instead of going to a national court but still you've got to engage with all the local regulate regulation so there's there's inevitably I think forever are going to be that requirement for specialist legal college within particular restriction and on interactions between jurisdictions that will always require an entirely conventional legal knowledge and so yes I think it's essential that with this interdisciplinary thing we do both law and engineering in-house that's the only way you tease out some of the kind of interesting laps and new areas but it's never going to be sort of all encompassed within house it would be bizarre to try and become a mark of every every single jurisdiction so there's gonna be plenty of work for lawyers with specialist expertise in specialist jurisdictions to provide the kind of input that is required in producing these kind of contracts so idea but yes of course there's going to be a little conventional legal work there and you know this is this is only in one small aspect of all the kind of commercial commercial side for now but

[23:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=1434s) yeah if you're if you're an early adopter if you're a lawyer interested in it seeing where where there is new space to move to I think there's there's some quite exciting new skills that you could move into and as I said initially I think these these are things that some good commercial lawyers will have been doing this anyway of course they'll have had a kind of implicit model of the space that their clients are operating in the kind the different kind relationships the different way those relationships can evolve and they try and shape those or support the clients choice about direction they try and support that as well as possible and then build enough around it to provide to provide the the clarity and to and to manage the risks as best they can but I think we'll be scoped now for a slight formalization of this I think I think what we're already developing is more of a a methodology that is systemically systemically aware I mean it's it's it's no longer the case that the contract is either executed or fully performed or not it's known it's just no longer the case that and yes there's always been scope for liquidated damages or for ways of trying to anticipate something that might go wrong and specify a remedy for it in advance to save the uncertainty of having or the expense of having to determine it later but now there's vastly greater scope for this for this kind of anticipation of different possible future evolutions of a given commercial relationship and to try and start mapping those out I think you're worth putting this in a kind of practical context so we have a set of clients that are about to hand and most of whom are developing some kind of a Ethereum based smart contract application which handles some kind of legal property and you get into a position where at some point there is a transfer of ownership or transfer status of the

[26:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=1584s) legal property and the intention is that that transfer of legal ownership or legal status will be triggered by an event of the blockchain typically a payment arrives or a certain amount of time elapses so you'd think that in principle this is a relatively simple process where you know the contract says well in this condition then when the ownership changes from one key to another cave the legal ownership the control change everybody signs their paper contracts and off you go to the races but in practice if you think about the kind of gnarly technical complexity the even a relatively simple smart contract Hans there's an enormous need to have very very specific domain understanding of what's happening for the smart contract to be created and with the represents the actual underlying reality similarly from those from the legal side of the house if you think about how complex even relatively simple contracts are because they directly interface with the full complexity of the world and anything that happens in the real world there must be some way of managing it inside of the paper contract or you wind up with a kind of hard crash event the entire thing turns into litigation and what we have is an interdisciplinary space in which all of complexity is put into a single techno social system which emits a contract fair the paper contract and the smart contract basically divide reality between them in a way that hopefully gives you a comprehensive coverage of the svet of things which can occur and we talk about this is contract enforceability engineering but really it's a new discipline for thinking about the interface between the complex nature of the real world and two different kinds of simplifying abstractions one of which is more on the second of which is code um and it's been quite a process of really beginning to frame what about discipline looks like because it asks a lot of very hard questions but the nature of complex systems the sort of philosophical underpinnings of how we do things like make decisions yes so the question was about how do I deal with specs Cummings for coming from clients with the clients that we've dealt so far well it was often the case that they come up with with a half a page sketch of what they were doing and they said yes we want this blockchain thing

[28:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=1734s) and I would go in and produce five-page technical requirements and technical specs out of that go back to them they were like well this is what I asked for which became a 10 page legal spec and then that became a 10 page legal spec and this is what they've all signed up for in the end but that whole process of coming from from an idea or a sketch of an idea to an actual deliverable product that is even enforceable in the real world and it's actually legal this was the book of the work for those clients and then we've written the code and for one of these projects we are now at at the end where we basically spent days together in in a meeting room just going line by line so like having a code on the left and and the written contract on the right and going line by line in the two of them to see if they match further Terry's iterating experience action my name is Dominic Cameron the building digital businesses in London not very large scale for about 30 years - related questions speak to engineering and operations about maturity and readiness I guess of the underlying frameworks the underlying platforms in other words partly about Ethereum and so on so at lunch liyan - and I were talking and he reminded me that where it is from 1990s phase of the evolution of blockchain we know it'll be faster than that perhaps compare the internet but still early phase I was wondering so - trying to nail a couple of questions which might be interesting to explore one is if you think about companies like DHL or Maersk or Costco when would you imagine how many years away would you imagine that at scale tens of thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands of trades per day impacted by the sorts of things we're talking about today are we three to five years away are we 10 to 15 years away and why and related to that what are the without getting into the kind of flame wars about you know etc' and and Carnot

[31:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=1884s) and all that stuff what is it given that you guys I think focused on the e cerium as primarily as an underling platform what are the things which companies like tears or CEOs Cardno are trying to resolve whether it's about interoperability or on scalability or on governance around whatever other themes what are the themes that you believe Ethereum have to solve at scale to solve in whatever way to be to to get on that path of delivering tens of thousands per day can

[31:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=1918s) I just say one line on on regarding contracts first absolute just because I do think it's important to realize that with with the Ricardian contracts concept this separation of legal terms and the software that implements it it actually gives you a lot of flexibility to use it doesn't lock you into a single software platform it's your country I mean I'm not sure why you would choose to do this unless there was some compelling underlying reason but conceivably a Ricardian contract could comprise some little written legal terms and more than one software system on the other side again I would potentially seem perverse in some cases but but I can imagine very complex situations where you would need to do that so I I just think that's that's an inherent flexibility about the returning contractor approach and a sort of argument against drive towards you know complete convertibility between code and rent language not only are they on different levels systemically in terms of what they're trying to describe but potentially sometimes the world needs to be dealt with with different systems in different places I mean it was

[33:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=1991s) theoretically you could rebase a contract so the legal agreement doesn't change you just peel out one implementation we're in a place of the different chunk of software this would be tricky to do on the floor large complex systems but if the legal agreements haven't changed switching the technical can be drafted into the legal contract as one of the things that you can do but the yep so on the question of maturity I think there's kind of two levels that we need to think about maturity for so one is that the scalability at the underlying blockchain system so you mentioned the idea of large companies and thousands of trades per day right now that's not possible on public blockchains the the scalability characteristics are just not appropriate for that so there's a there's a good amount of engineering work that needs to be done there if we're going to do this on public change you can do it now on private change than IBM will tell you very good story about about masks and I'm hiper ledger and that is you know a very good work that's being done and we're not in any sense opposed to that I think the people have their views about public versus private Ledger's you know our view is you pick the right tool for the right job I think this the second part of the the maturity question is is really the engineering culture and do we actually have enough people out there do we actually have the capability to deliver these systems because if you look at what web development did web development pulled a large number of people into the software industry the massive expansion of of the number of people writing code one of my favorite possessions is a book I think written in the 1997-1998 called after the gold rush and it was it was on the premise that the great gold rush era of software began in the 1980s and it roughly finished sometime in the mid nineteen nine and that was now settled down a professionalized software development because we weren't going to need to pull in a huge number of new people this turned out not to be the case but what we've never really done is developed a professional code of software engineering is the the general attitude summed up a company like Facebook was moving faster break things so move fast and break things is great when you're deploying something to a web server you break it in the morning you look at your logs you see that there's some kind of you know errors are being reported and you push out a fix that afternoon and that works you know very well where what you're really measuring in that instance is not how many bugs did we have but how long did it take us to fix all the bugs we after we found out about them and this kind of works you know I mean you get

[35:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=2141s) updates on your phone every single day you get websites to get updated several times a day it works for those kinds of systems that approach does not work at all for right you know if you're mad getting a letter from your back saying we updated the terms of your mortgage contract and you're receiving several letters a day as new updates of a person it just doesn't make any sense at all trust us so so I think what we have to need is a very different engineering culture for these kinds of you know hybrid legal and technical systems which is a culture of you know zero defects of making sure the thing actually works correctly and where there are absolutely they do need to be these kind of exception handling systems where where something goes wrong because the one rule is something always goes wrong some unexpected aspect of reality occurs but we're at an interesting situation now were four smart contracts I mean as someone who's worked as a software developer for many years when I write some code for instance that appears on a website that's gonna run on millions of computers around the world that are ranked different Hardware different versions of operating systems different web browsers if it goes wrong it's kind of a little bit unfair to hold me personally responsible for the fact that on some particularly weird configuration of system my code turns out not to work entirely as expected but with smart contracts they run again on millions of computers all around the world but those computers compare their results and make sure that they all agreed on what the results of the smart contract was if it does something it does it becoming programmed it to do it that way and not because there are kind of weird errors being introduced by different hardware and operating system configurations so we've had cases now of deployed smart contracts on Ethereum that have caused financial losses or we can directly measure the financial loss you can then go to github and look at the code and you can go right down to the individual line and you can look at the commit history and there's a lovely command and get called it blame which tells you who wrote that line so you can actually find out directly so exact receipt so there is a there is a level of accountability and smart contract engineering which is just not present in web development or by lap development and I think the cultural we have not yet internal the software industry has not yet at all began to internalize the cultural change that you get from that and I think that is going to be a that that is going to be a very big driver of a new kinds of maturity for software engineering is that what were you in the cultural change um well I mean at this point

[38:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=2291s) Ethereum foreign contrived goofs have cost many hundreds of millions of dollars I would say that the engineering culture is we need to get a little weary er probably know better than that that's

[38:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=2304s) not not down to preference anymore and these guys enforce it and you know all of this gets into the much more general domain of how you do reliability engineering for big systems and that is still very much a craft I think that I mean I would be unsurprising if in five years she saw an enormous influx of expertise from aerospace and satellite into these areas simply end up with so much of a leak where risk those kind of engineering practices become well much more sensible way to approach it I don't know for sure that's the way it will go but it would be it'd be an unsurprising future hybridization oh you only think yeah the government sort of thing um it's such a hard question so the right now the vox utor okay so the the federal thing with all of this is that the blockchain is extremely poorly defined right at the offense a people the crypto currencies today's equivalent of the term horseless carriage these things are no more currencies that arab we moved two cars were horse carriages but we don't really know what they are yet because we're in this awkward transitional period as we used to be with the internet we're defining these things as a profession right there was there was a period in the late 90s we're just telling people what the internet was was a job and then after pilot job goes away right and this is true with social media there was a period social media was was a job there was a profession called social media consultant not so much of that anymore so similarly we're in this thing where we're in a position where language formation lags behind the technological reality so when we talk about governance on blockchains we've got an established body of practices for governance and we've got this kind of wibbly-wobbly squeezy thing called the blockchain which constantly changes because the book chain isn't an object it's a process it's a cultural initiative it's a it's a thing a bit like you know if you think of something like sport sport contains a myriad of things invoke train is about this general term of sport it's not a clearly defined entity so when we talk about the government's question blockchain for some people what they hear is how do we refer about transaction I know other people here is how do we modify the

[40:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RwXdU6hNw&t=2454s) software systems to choose for example a scale and algorithm we're gonna try and then in the middle there's a whole bunch of questions about identity and some people want to build these things into blockchains and other people think that those are applications so right now in terms of getting large-scale you know systems to run I think what you're going to get is the most conservative systems when the systems which are least like the new and most like the old will be things which look a bit like online transaction process and they might even come from the old vendors like si P and those things will likely be the first systems that begin to carry you know the first canal couple of 20 50 100 billion dollars worth of real trade transactions the question that is the equilibrium between the legacies people who had a thin layer of blockchain on the blockchain people that learned their way back into legacy and that struggle happened right the way through the web business for decades now that tension between legacy players acquiring web features and web features crying legacy skill the demarcation has you know I mean half of the advertising money spent for business business web stuff was probably sent by people fighting that mount line and I think that will be exactly the same way with blockchain and notably you know Facebook Amazon Google Microsoft you know they've all been there reticent announcer blockchain strategies ASAP an Oracle practically nothing heard so I really think that the majority of the heavy trade stuff who initially happen when for example Oracle launches a blockchain shaped thing and it'll be about 15 or 20 percent blocks you know we are thin layer on top of Oracle but it's much more credible to me that you'll see large value transactions or those kind of systems that a whole scale fight on to even a very fast version of Ethereum because it turns out that the enterprise has a whole bunch of needs which are nothing to do with the technology working you want to say a bit more about that Rob hmm I think it's

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/633-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [633] Mattereum panel at the Internet of Agreements conference, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.