# WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with Vinay Gupta (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [678], 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, 2022-02-12 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ. 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): Contracting layer's legal reach.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Taking a crack at a practical system (introducing the ESCROWNYM) (2012): Blog essay proposing the escrownym: an identity lodged with escrow brokers under a legally binding... (suggested by machine)
  - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (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)
  - CoinDesk (2020): CoinDesk interview on an identity layer for physical things. (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (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)
- Topics: Smart contracts, law & arbitration (26%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (21%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: semantic web (6 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); NFT (14 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); cost per unit of human benefit (2 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2022); crypto cash (2 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2022); Asset Passport (7 here; 33 sources in all, earliest dated 2017, 2 undated); cypherpunk vision (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); Ireland (5 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Mattereum (15 here; 127 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); digital gold (2 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); real estate (11 here; 106 sources in all, earliest dated 2013, 2 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): cost per unit of human benefit; crypto cash; Hope for Mattereum; peer-to-peer trade; prejudice as a service
- Importance: core-text score 0.29 (1.00 is the top), number 267 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [722] ["10 Years of Ethereum... Tokenization is here." ---- RWA... (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/722.md): close in content (cosine 0.92)
  - [682] [Ep. #641 - Vinay Gupta on China, Futurism, Government,... (2026)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/682.md): close in content (cosine 0.91)
- On the same works, just before: [714] [Autonomous A1 - Taming Capitalism with Vinay Gupta of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/714.md); [702] [Conversation With Pat Kane & Vinay Gupta (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/702.md); [778] [Vinay Gupta on the Future of the Metaverse (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/778.md)
- On the same works, just after: [790] ['Mattereum is Blockchain Cypherpunk' (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/790.md); [735] [Vinay Gupta - Mattereum (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/735.md); [199] [IG Wines with Mattereum (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/199.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: WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with Vinay Gupta, video, 2022-02-12, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [678], https://guptaoption.com/texts/678.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=0s) welcome to what is new in the world of blockchain my name is david orban i am managing advisor of beyond enterprises uh we love bringing you thought leaders in this frontier of technology that even though is already 10 years old and more is still often misunderstood both in what it stands for how it aims to achieve its goals and uh how it can benefit uh a diverse but inclusive set of people uh organizations uh enterprises and uh which is so full of creativity and passion around people who come up with great new ideas and arguably often not picking the best acronyms or the best descriptors and labels for them nfts i don't even want to say what they stand for for anyone who doesn't already know because saying that it stands for non-fungible tokens is making just things worse uh rather than making them better and today i am very happy to welcome our guest because i have been following his work for for really many years and he has such a

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=150s) diverse set of accomplishments as well as current activities that have uh very um interesting and uh potentially very important implications and so let's welcome vinay gupta hi good to be here um good to talk to you again thank you thank you vinay for being here with us i i realize uh rather than showing my name in the in the banners as an overlay i am already showing your twitter account which is one of the best ways for people to get in touch with you you have an active uh twitter presence with very interesting threads as i was preparing for uh this episode i just read uh the thread that you pinned the to the to the top of your twitter stream uh it starts doing it probably out if i define it here is my best short summary the human race is currently running the world like a death camp for poor and particularly for the other species which reform or drive into extinction fixing this situation is possible but it requires well so there you go it's uh it's an important starting point and uh what what brought you where you are and in particular what brought you into the the world of of blockchain um

[4:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=249s) so my history goes back to the 1990s uh i was involved very heavily in uh the kind of cypherpunk movement in the 90s and my first year or 100 of my salary went through crypto cash was 1999. so 99 2 000 that you your full year of salary and crypto cash um uh then i did a little bit of work in the defense world after 9 11 specifically on crypto projects uh both in the u.s and in the uk specifically looking at how we could protect biometric data from being abused by metro privacy stuff uh and then after that uh 2014 i i got an interest in bitcoin and i spent a lot of time talking about bitcoin um and i came to the conclusion that bitcoin's biggest threat wasn't the state but it was competitors that were more technologically sophisticated so i was getting kind of accused into like hey what's out there and then i saw ethereum and it was like ah smart contracts and i had been part of the community that was very interested in smart contracts conceptually ten years before bitcoin uh was launched but way back in the kind of nixon where every day is figuring that stuff out the e e-writes guys um so you know mark the worst team like i'd been around all of that stuff conceptually for ages and ages knew the names read the papers so when i saw something that was doing smart contracts i'm like okay that's my boss i'm gonna get on there join the ethereum team and became the release coordinator for the ethereum launch in 2015 didn't know what the early communications work uh and now i'm basically implementing a bunch of the core concepts from the cypherpangira in the 1990s i'm implementing all of those core concepts on the blockchain to bring the kind of full power of the cypherpunk vision to bear on the present because the smart contract is a small piece of the cypherpunk vision it's a much bigger and and uh when you talk to people who are cautious uh because they know deep uh uh how important the mission is and they are not driven by the hype of the moment or the the beer market of uh you know whatever period and we both uh went through both uh stages many many times in the history of of bitcoin uh well if you ask them how are things going they will reply so far so good

[6:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=399s) so what do you what do you think is the bitcoin experiment beyond certain stages where the kind of attackers that you mentioned could uh threaten it on one question and the second question is ethereum which an experiment right it's code we found a lot of bugs important ones too we had a furious debate in the community and the forked hard forked and and then and then here we are after a few years ethereum seems to be going so far so good so how do you feel about the maturity of these two big important uh projects

[7:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=453s) so both of these projects are really showing their age yeah bitcoin has become more and more and more well understood more and more people are using it um but not much has happened which is new in quite a while you know it's very very mature it's very very dug in it's very kind of institutional and blue chip and you know all the rest of that stuff but bitcoin is beginning to look a lot like uh legacy systems you know it's big it's standard everybody's using it but it can't solve most of the problems that people want to solve with it without very very complex layer two infrastructure and you know we still don't really have all of that stuff worked out quite right i mean it's kind of the innovation has kind of moved past bitcoin because the next you know deck tupling like when you go from you know how many bitcoin users we have now maybe 100 million something like that you know if you go from 100 million to a billion all of the technology which will be used to get that population using bitcoin will not be bitcoin technology there'll be way or two systems it will be credit card integration it will be you know integration with shopify it'll be all kinds of other build outs around that core system and it will have to adjust you know keeping the transaction cost slow which basically means things like lightning network or something there um you know with somebody will figure out how to take optimistic roll-ups and pour them back to bitcoin or something i don't know what they're going to do so that thing of when the technology gets to be so mature that all of the next steps are not that technology there are things around that technology that's a real sign that something is becoming like very very mainstream and heading into legacy um and ethereum's problem is very simple which is it's promised scaling forever and it hasn't scaled yet and that's really problematic you know ethereum needs to be fast and i keep hearing it's gonna be fast and it's not fast yet and that's making huge amounts of room for things like avalanche to come along and avalanche is here now and it works just like ethereum but it's fast okay now so i mean it's quite uh we will we will probably go back to this uh because as we talk about Mattereum and what the project is doing uh these days uh what are your latest uh milestones and achievements we will have the opportunity of asking ourselves okay gas prices and all these fun questions and then potentially composability over or across multiple chains so let's let's go back there hopefully but

[10:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=603s) why don't you tell me about Mattereum and what uh how did it come about what drove you to found it what is its mission

[10:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=617s) so material makes smart contracts legally enforceable so you take an event that happens on chain i pay you for something or we exchange some tokens for some other token something along these kind of lines and Mattereum makes that transaction visible as a legal event in 160 countries so somebody does something on chain you say now you owe me something i take the proof that you owe me that thing in the form of a contract or court and that court recognizes the blockchain as a source of evidence recognizes blockchain transactions as valid makes a ruling and that ruling is enforceable in literally all the countries that signed up to the 1958 euro convention which at this point is well over 160 nations um what we do with the legal enforcement capability is we make it possible to buy and sell physical assets on the blockchain gold bars fine art collectibles the biggest thing that we've done recently is we sold an antique ring for 65 000 and we've worked very closely with william shatner who is the actor who played captain kirk on star trek there will be another collection from uh mr shatner coming up where we probably late q1 or week you two um we have um if you scroll down just a little further into the news page there's this little bit of news down there oh here we go so this is a an asset passport for a warhol print of alexander the great which is about to be sold and these are nfts for the physical dudes so there's a vault the picture of alexander the great is in the vault uh it's a warhol print and when you buy the nft you get the legal right to take that object out of the vault and take it for your own and you could potentially sell that nft a number of times before somebody decides that they want to take the physical delivery and how do you address uh what in in in the blockchain world is called the oracle problem i mean if the trust is in the smart contract trust stops where the smart contract ends and interface with the physical world becomes the vulnerable attack surface yes so um let's take a look at the uh warranty that's behind you on the uh on the screen share so if you bring that up again yeah

[12:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=767s) scroll down just a little bit you should see a link where it says legal contract have a click of that it's up a little just at the top of the page there legal contract so the way that our system works is there are real warranties attached to each item so you and i are going to do a trade and you make a legal guarantee that the object in the vault is one kilogram of gold or a warhol print that legal guarantee attaches the owner of the nft so i buy the nft and what comes with the nft is your legal guarantee and there is a direct legal and financial relationship between us at that point so we can now enforce the promises that you made on the blockchain in the real world against your physical assets in in certain jurisdictions common law jurisdictions uh the proof of of that is for a claim to be asserted against a broken warranty again for example right has this happened yet uh with the Mattereum claim not yet no we have tested it in moot so we've had a qc which is the most senior class of lawyers in the uk so there are solicitors barristers and at the top of the pilot of the qcs so we had a qc who chose to run a moot on a Mattereum contract and test the contract and make sure that it would work and they did an enforceability check and it is indeed enforceable we also worked very closely with the uk jurisdiction task force which is a group constituted by the uk high court and the uk law society in a partnership um and the uk jurisdiction task force has actually extended the rules of arbitration in the uk specifically for handling digital disputes under arbitration that involve blockchain property so these these assessments uh um raise the degree of the raise the probability that were the contract the legal agreement broken and the party suffering assert their claim in in court they would be able to to win they would be able to have the the contract validated by the court yes and remember that we're going to private courts not uh national courts

[15:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=917s) so international arbitration is a convention i mentioned this 1950 euro convention so the international arbitration convention says if you and i have a contract together and we agree that if there is a dispute the judge will be a swiss lawyer from one of the following five law firms the 1958 convention says that or both of our countries will regard the uh resolution of that lawyer as if it had been made by a judge in our own country so what this gives is enormous legal force to these opt-in legal structures

[15:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=958s) because once again the trust ends at the court because if i have a judgment against another party i have to be able to execute that judgment right absolutely so are autonomous machines of some kind going to be triggered by court judgments where for example the swiss vault that holds the painting uh would open for me to pick it up so this is here now this is not 20 years out right so i mentioned that we worked very closely with uk jurisdiction task force on their new arbitration rules for uh digital assets right so in clause 11 of their guidance it states that basically um if the arbitrator of the case has the technical ability to make an award so they could do something like take an escrow contract and decide which party will get the escrow they're legally empowered in the uk to do that so when it comes to the process both sides present the evidence which is almost entirely or entirely unchanged the arbitrator who is a privately appointed lawyer or barrister who has uh excellent technical credentials as well as legal credentials examines the evidence they make a decision and then they take the crypto key that they were given as part of their being kind of instantiated as the judge in this situation and they use that crypto key to directly access the account which stores the value and then they can award the escrow to one part to the other party they can reissue an nft they can move the asset from one person to another person's control and they are fully legally insulated you can't sue them because they're acting under the arbitration act which gives them legal indemnity just like a judge so what we're attempting to do here is super empower arbitrators right and arbitration was the backbone of international business it's absolutely the backbone because you know if you are a french shipping company and you're commissioning repair work on one of your ships from a place in vietnam um in all probability neither party

[18:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=1108s) trusts the other countries lower the other country's court right they're always going to favor the person from their country so you pick a neutral third jurisdiction which is usually london and then the arbitration happens there and that as an approach it forms a kind of de facto global jurisdiction in which commerce happens and what we are doing is we are taking the de facto global jurisdiction of the blockchain and we're attaching it to the different fatigue global jurisdiction of the arbitration world and connecting these two things together gives us a technologically enhanced arbitration world or it gives us a legally enhanced blockchain world right it's bringing two existing global systems together in a single unified hole um often the promise of of of blockchain is to lower the barriers to entry to some um facet of the modern world where too many people were excluded before whether it is banking or international commerce which are the the traditional examples and in this case it would sound that rather than talking about uh a huge multinational shipping company on one side and uh a port of access uh worth billions of dollars on the other side having a dispute there could be a lot of other things and a lot of people who would never have even thought about using arbitration as a as a process now they will have access to it um through the the Mattereum platform potentially yeah is that correct absolutely um so

[20:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=1215s) making arbitration cheap is dangerous right and it's dangerous because unless the evidence is very strong if you do cheap arbitration you're going to get kind of rapid decision making or not great cases right so there are a lot of people out there that think that the objective is to make arbitration cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and we do this by having less and less qualified people acting as judges that kind of stuff eventually is just going to break the arbitration system because the rulings will be of such low quality that the nation-states will just change the rules and those people will no longer be allowed to arbitrate so the only way you could get cheap high-quality arbitration is by having crystal clear evidence gathering every single step of the process so that 99.9 of the time you look at the data and you understand exactly what's happening you know where to make the award and to get there we need a very deep pervisive soaking of the blockchain into the transactional layer so when you ship a box by fedex fedex isn't publishing that data to chain or right but in 20 years when we talk about making these systems cheap fedex will put it into the chain right you know when you take a package from the door there'll be a blockchain transaction where you take legal custody of the package and you'll be able to open it right there in front of an app running on your phone which will log the data directly to the chain in a way that makes it evidential you know i open the package in front of my phone my phone is running the core up the core app records what happens when i open the box that's seen as being legally authoritative data gallery so there's a lot of infrastructure you have to build to get really high quality evidence collection before you can get into that kind of position 20 years ago um my activities were already digital but a little bit less let's say 30. a little bit less digital than than today and i remember being fascinated by inco terms table of of when the responsibility during a shipment goes from uh filling the ship then getting to port then on on loading the the goods and and and really complex uh agreements around uh when uh one or the other party is responsible for for the shipment so as you described fedex and my my next generation alexa ring doorbell uh documenting the the unchain uh custody and and legal

[22:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=1365s) ownership of a of a good is a supercharged uh incontrovertible chain of evidence that that will be very very interesting what role do um custody or non-custody solutions play here uh if i um if i if i don't hand over the private key am i gonna go to jail until i do what what what's gonna be the solution for a for a non-custodial system to to be part of this so the answer to almost every question when it gets to crypto in the real world is escrow escrow is where it's at because you know at the end of the day we're not going to see a world in which non-custodial wallets are accessible to court order it's never going to happen right so if you and i are going to do a transaction both parties have to have escrowed value bigger than the value of the transaction right and that value sits there available for you know a litigator to come and claim and when we both agree that the transaction was successfully done then we release our escrows and everything opens up again and it has to be an escrow on both ends of the deal right you can't make the payment set in escrow but what if the damage done is greater than the payment you know if you send me a part for my car and it blows up my engine the park costs two hundred dollars and the engine damage is sixty eight hundred dollars we need to have the ability to have guarantees for more than the price of the payment going across so you have a hundred thousand dollar bond which sits there guaranteeing all of your trade we do a bunch of transactions i come along and say i want sixty eight hundred dollars in the settlement at that point immediately sixty eight hundred dollars is frozen right then we go through the arbitration process and at the end of that either the money is released or it's awarded to me and i want to stress that's not 20 years out right the legal machinery for that came from the uk jurisdiction task force last year we have implementations of the Mattereum system that use it and we have physical assets issued on that platform right now

[25:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=1502s) so what do you see as your next challenges around uh Mattereum what are your your dreams uh what will make your dreams come true so we're doing real estate right the next big piece of news is we're going to do the first real estate transactions um and you know once you can move real estate around on an nft welcome to the 21st century we're here now um and you know i mean imagine the the difference between the existing real estate systems and an nft based real estate system you know you buy the nft you call the estate agent you tell them you're the owner of the nft and you're coming to the hou the office to pick up the keys yeah you're like really and it's like yeah really really really right we can do that right now we're in the late stages of uh you know actually shipping products projects to do that that is that is fantastic uh what kind of new markets will develop around the frictionless uh transactability of of asset classes that before were much less liquid

[26:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=1577s) well so here um let's talk about how to save the world with crypto okay because we know that the world's main problem is environmental and also poverty these are the two big challenges you know what we say is capitalism is extractive at one end and polluting on the other right so what would it take to dramatically increase the efficiency of which goods circulate in society to the point where we can hugely expand the amount of human welfare that we can create for every unit of environmental damage that we do by existing right give you an example right i have on my desk a pair of binoculars right now i have more than one pair of binoculars in my house right and only the pair of my desk ever really gets used so if i had a liquid market for the other binocular this pair of binoculars that i own i could immediately just take those binoculars drop them into a box outside of my front door and somebody would put some money in my bank account and i'd be set right and that would be one last pair of binoculars that the world has to manufacture so i could take the pair that i actually use to go and watch the deer in the backyard and i can you know these are my brochures the other block yours they can just go roaming around and somebody else can buy them they could have five or six other people could buy them if the goods have liquidity right the problem is that if i want to sell the other binoculars the ones they don't use if i want to sell them it's 10 times more work to sell than the economic benefit to me of getting a pair of binoculars sold for 16 right it just doesn't help i remember being in love with the concept of ebay and hating to use ebay exactly right so let me find these guys i actually tried to convince my children who were young at the time that they should tom sawyer like use ebay because it was so much fun but they called my bluff and they always refused i i i couldn't incentivize them enough and they would still say no listen too much work exactly exactly there's your problem so here we have some Mattereum tags right so each one of these tags is a wallet on chip right so there is a cryptographic secret key on this tag and when you beef it

[28:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=1727s) against your phone uh it does a cryptographic signature to prove that this key is on this chip but you can't get the secret key off the chip um so if i stick one of these tags onto the binoculars right now the binoculars have a digital id right and we can take everything we know about these binoculars manufacturer brand all the rest of that information we can tie all of that stuff together and immediately at that point we've got a digital identity and when we come to sell this thing we don't have to go and take pictures of the thing and all the rest of that stuff all we need is a third party to look at the binoculars look at the asset passport that describes them and says they still match the asset passport and then that third party puts the claim that these two things match into the asset passport as a new claim and then at that point they're free they can be sold immediately it's literally somebody holds them up checks the match looks through them says beeps the target these are exactly the same thing i verify all this is still true boom you can now sell them well sounds really really wonderful and as you said very healthy for the environment very much towards accelerating the speed of money in the system without uselessly creating new gizmos or gadgets that that we don't need right and then this is here like today this sounds like science fiction futures wall but it's not science fiction which is what i mean you know we got the tags right there right you know we literally just stick them onto things and off you go so that is an approach right imagine what happens to the world when we've got correct specifications for everything right because this asset passport thing that says some passport thing has a bunch of machine readable data in it remember all that semantic web stuff yeah well uh tim berners-lee used to call web free something that is completely different what web 3 is today but yeah that was the semantic web that was the semantic web so instead of semantic web semantic blockchain yeah we take the semantic web data we embed it in the asset passport the asset passport is tied to the nft and the nft is tied to the chip right and now we scan the chip and we get semantic web machine readable data

[31:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=1877s) about what the object is can you imagine what this is going to do to the world

[31:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=1887s) one of the beautiful uh consequences of technology is that the the way it it develops is allowing groups of people and group groups of companies or countries or continents to to leapfrog there was a some some industry report in the 80s saying africa will never have smartphones because there isn't enough copper in the world to lay down the cables and uh well obviously with smartphones or mobile phones first you stopped needing the cables and africa and india and china have phones are plenty where do you think the leap frogging opportunities are coming here because it would sound like the low hanging fruit is in the uk as you mentioned and of course one of the largest real estate markets is new york so why don't why don't we do uh real estate transactions with Mattereum on the blockchain in new york but two problems one is that yes it would sound easy but actually incumbent interests will raise the bar for against execution two the benefit accrues to establish the structures rather than spreading out more widely so do you have any examples where this kind of leap crogging could uplift 100 million people here 200 million people there providing a wider spreading of of the benefit of these technologies so i think that we can roughly quadruple the efficiency of global capitalism right i think we can take the cost per unit of human benefit i think we can quarter the cost per unit of human benefit right now that's a bold claim right but how many owners should a thing have over its lifetime

[33:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=2037s) one two three four if it's four owners capitalism is now four times more efficient right now that doesn't cover energy it doesn't cover services but you know i'll give you an example right i seem to have too many usb batteries right how did i wind up with too many you kind of lose them when you're on a trip and you discover that they were still in your bag but you've already ordered another one and that happens two or three times over five years and now you've got like a swarm of damage somebody out there is buying a new one of these right now even though this thing has probably been used less than 200 times right if we could certify how much volume is still left in this battery i could sell this into more money right now what happens to the world when every single thing that a rich person in uh america or europe doesn't need is sold on to somebody who's less wealthy right what happens is we take the existing pool of goods and goods which currently covers about 2 billion rich people are kind of in the stuff world right then there's another four billion five billion people that aren't really in the stuffed world they have barely enough stuff two billion people have too much stuff so we're just gonna stick a price tag on every single thing that a person's rich world no longer needs and then we're going to sell right some of that stuff is going to be sold to other people in the rich world most of it is going to be sold to people in the developing world an alternative could be that rather than imitating uselessly the wasteful uh models that have been adopted in the in the developed world communities will become wealthier through a different model that is more around the lines of faster sharing of goods and even efficient sharing of goods and also redesigned by this technology you've been to india right yes so in india practically everything that can be made out of stainless steel is made of stainless steel caps saucers plates trays you know the stuff i'm talking about this kind of stainless steel looking right there how long does stainless steel last centuries none of that stuff is ever going to be a manufacturer to get those things are

[36:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=2187s) permanently here a stainless steel cup never wears out nobody throws it in the trash it just lasts forever right so this we call permafracture right we make things to last forever because they're going to be sold and sold and sold and sold and the rule is this the rule is a human being never buys anything they don't intend to sell again and if i buy something with the intention of selling it i will take good care of it i will buy it with good quality i will make sure that it lasts i'll make sure that it can be repaired i'll make sure that it's easy to test to verify that it functions in a set of other attributes and this permafalcular approach where you know you make sure that everything you buy you intend to sell again means that whenever you stop using the thing you execute the sale fund that you had when you bought it originally you get rid of it i am not very much into luxury goods but one of my favorite advertisings in the economist is a black and white photo of a father with a kid sailing and you see the watch on the father and the tagline says you never really own this watch you just preserve it for the next generation and like that for everything that we manufacture

[37:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=2265s) very good we have someone following us from kenya david dewart and his other comment is too long to display because we would drawn in the text but he actually refers to a meeting that he had with the maasai elders in kenya and tanzania which of course has a deep deep culture that deserves not only to be preserved but to be um to be well neither monetizing and securitizing or none of these labels are appropriate but to to make the uh uh an instrument of of empowerment for that culture that today um is not sufficiently uh able to leverage it and and through the examples and the technologies of NFTs and others they they really could achieve uh recognition beyond the the the what what happens uh today oh yeah i mean take an example right if i want to buy right let's say a massage stool right i want some beside for insurance i want them a size stool i'm going to buy one the biggest obstacle i have is that if i try and buy a massage stool on ebay what i'm going to get is a cheap knockoff that was made in some other country by somebody in front of yeah yeah and then actually david is writing exactly that he said global brands make money using their uh cultural objects knocking them off right so this inability for those people to prove that they manufactured something so that i only buy a genuine object made by a specific craftsman right we get back to these good old-fashioned digital tags here right here we go if the messiah have these things on cell phones you make an object you embed this in the object of manufacturing you scan the tag and verify the identity of the object before it goes into the sales pipe and i'd buy the nft which means that i own the object and now you ship it to me right and that as a process you know i mean i can't i can't over stress how

[40:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=2415s) the the shadow of fraud reduces our willingness to trade directly with people in the developing world right because you don't know when you buy something that you're going to get something that was really made by the messiah you don't know that you're going to get something which works you know you don't know that you're going to be sold on knockoff it breaks down the possibility of global peer-to-peer trade because we don't have global peer-to-peer trust and if we have this global peer-to-peer trust because the tags work the object identification works the payments work the justice system works you can get this trade sorted out anybody that has something to sell and has cultural value to sell with that something has the ability to do that successfully right and it sounds kind of dumb but a good example this is music you know the um the kind of bedouin guitar bands have come out of mcgrad yes yes not deeply but i have a friend in of of tunisian origin and he always uh shares that kind of music with me now that musical genre is kind of right now understood to be the best guitar music in the world right that's like oh you know musicians musicians these people are fantastic and they've managed to make enough of a jump to the world of copyright and branding and distribution that they're doing tours their musicals on spotify their music is on youtube they're making a living doing this stuff because there is a strong enough connection for copyrighted material to link it at one end to their bank accounts and link it at the other end of the media distribution machinery and as a result that stuff has become an industry they're getting paid they're not getting paid as much as they should no musician is getting paid what they but they're getting paid right that's not happening for manufacturing right it's not happening for clothing it's not happening for food it's not happening for furniture um

[42:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=2533s) so there are these waves of attention and and there are movements and labels fair trade and then you go and buy fair trade coffee beans and fair trade trinkets of whatever kind even those are unable to deliver the value to the producers to the degree that they should well it's just a digital question right i mean if you have an analog fair trade system that was designed 40 years ago you know they do they do it for a category of goods right this thing was fair trade okay but there are like four thousand of them and i know fair trade is a standard but i don't have the standards enforced properly i have some doubts right if i can see a video of the person making the thing right i got the workshop i got the camera the camera films me making the thing right and then at the end of that process there's a tag on the thing and i beep it against the camera and it registers that video as the video of the thing that you manufactured fair trade is my money goes directly into the digital wallet of the person that i just watched making the thing that i have in my house you see what i'm saying like it's just that radical transparency all the way down the manufacturing supply chain is possible now we have the technology to do it and this is how we clean up you know the enormous sort of environmental and social footprint of capitalism it's by making sure that people can see the consequences right down to the original mining of the goods and the manufacturing of goods total transparency let's flip it around many countries need to upgrade their [Music] social contracts and in this i include western countries too and and there is a large difficulty in doing that um in in some countries the work is even harder it is not even oh our representative democracy is broken we must repair it it is well we have a dictatorship that kills people and for a lot of those of us who are active in blockchain the issue of a self-sovereign identity and a strong ability

[44:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=2683s) for privacy at least pseudonymously but in some circumstances anonymously is seen as being crucial or supporting the kind of radical change that is needed uh in in certain certain uh circumstances i'm not even talking about being becoming or being a revolutionary i am maybe even talking about something as simple as as uh being gay in a country where it is punished by death being gay those who have listened to us until now had this vision of everything being tagged of everything being tracked merchant having their reputation on chain every buyer having their reputation on chain oh how do you see this world coexisting with the need for strong privacy or even anonymity

[45:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeCGtc0tOQ&t=2749s) good question excellent question so the first thing is i absolutely do not believe in reputation systems in any form at all right surveillance capitalism doesn't get better run as a network of 100 million cottages compared to a single big factory right reputation is terrible the core concept of reputation is terrible it's literally just prejudice as a service right because you know think of this situation right you are a black uber driver in a racist suburb of a right-wing american city right the reputation system is constantly going to be used to punish you for being black and nobody is ever going to be accountable because they're just marking you down half a star half a star half a star half a star until you're driven off the platform right reputation is literally just prejudiced as a service we should never use reputation in any situation that we can possibly avoid it and that's almost everything what we do want is restitution i just googled in quotes as a service and i don't remember now what is the result uh how do you call the result when you search something and you only have one result almost six six goodness gracious the service has six results in google well it should be more popular now because now people will know it right so i think prejudice is that we don't want that right what we want is not reputation we want restitution right i took a ride in the super and the guy got totally lost he wasn't paying attention to the map on the screen he thought he knew where he should go himself as a result i missed my flight and it cost me twelve hundred dollars right restitution somebody has to pay for the damage that i took because somebody didn't do their damn job right and that as a model right you and i engage in trade there are funds set aside for restitution or an insurance contract drawn on an insurer right if something goes wrong in our transaction if i claim on your insurance rather than claiming on your your identity i can take the money from your insurer without ever having to know who you are what is i think very interesting and i i will have to think about this more is that the way that you describe this system which creates a distance between the

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/678-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [678] WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with Vinay Gupta, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.