# "Saving the Climate with Real World Asset NFTs" by Vinay Gupta | MoneyDance 2020 > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [723]. 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, 2020-11-20 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV0y3eZrVtg. 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 as the tool for a zero-waste growth economy. - Career works it belongs to: - Whole-Systems Framework for Sustainable Consumption and Production (2003): Rocky Mountain Institute report for the Danish Environmental Protection Agency on sustainable consumption... - Lean Green Mattereum: "We aren't just here to change the world, we're here to fix it" (2020): 162-page deck tying it together: poverty and climate are one problem, a lean green development path is... - The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out of ideas (2010): One-page paper: the richest fifth are eating the planet, so the next economy has to be at peace with other... (suggested by machine) - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine) - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (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: - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. - social enterprise: Enterprises that turn money into social capital and back: the capital conversion matrix from the Rocky Mountain... - 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) - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (through a work suggested by machine) - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (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) - Topics: Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (27%); Capitalism, consumption & resources (18%); Information markets — universal registers and digital twins (18%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: SSL certificates (2 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2020); product information (4 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2019, 2 undated); DNS (5 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); product information market (2 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2020); zero-waste (2 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); certificates (3 here; 26 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); recycling (2 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); real world asset NFTs (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); CO2 footprint (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2020); product information markets (1 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2019, 2 undated) - The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): SSL certificates - Importance: core-text score 0.58 (1.00 is the top), number 49 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [714] [Autonomous A1 - Taming Capitalism with Vinay Gupta of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/714.md): same career work: Lean Green Mattereum: "We aren't just here to change the world, we're here to fix it" - [236] [The Mattereum Top Down Deck Day 6 (Lean Green Mattereum) (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/236.md): same career work: Lean Green Mattereum: "We aren't just here to change the world, we're here to fix it" - On the same works, just before: [770] [Grounded Gabbin' with Vinay Gupta (on the meta-crisis) (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/770.md); [683] [CommunityZ Chest - Vinay Gupta, Founder of Mattereum, In... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/683.md); [248] [Vinay Gupta Thought Menu on Enlightenment (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/248.md) - On the same works, just after: [730] [The Bitcoin Podcast Interview #343- Vinay Gupta CEO Of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/730.md); [774] [All Power To The Imagination #10 | with special guest... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/774.md); [680] [Blockchain technology, trade-offs, and helping launch... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/680.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: "Saving the Climate with Real World Asset NFTs" by Vinay Gupta | MoneyDance 2020, video, 2020-11-20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV0y3eZrVtg; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [723], https://guptaoption.com/texts/723.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV0y3eZrVtg&t=0s) uh hi everybody i'm Vinay gupta of Mattereum uh formerly an energy policy analyst uh i worked at rocky mountain institute and then in a bunch of defense think tanks um and i was the release coordinator for the ethereum launch uh in 2014 2015. uh and what i'm going to talk about today is the really big story right blockchain as a field has gotten very badly lost um because it doesn't have a really coherent theory about how we're going to fix the world and we're aware the world is in desperate need of fixing um the original kind of bitcoin story for how we fix the world was that bitcoin was going to starve the government's tax revenue and because the libertarians thought the governments were the problem this was going to magically fix the world gave that a try didn't really get anywhere um second big blockchain theory of change was we were going to fix the world by banking the unbanked and we were going to see billions of people with financial inclusion because it was possible to do very cheap transactions you may have noticed we didn't exactly get there so what i'm going to talk about is a big theory of change for why it is worth doing blockchain stuff at all in a world which is filled with people doing things like building rocket ships to mars right of all the things that brilliant engineers could be spending their time with are we here to change the world or are we just modernizing wall street uh and i'm going to argue that we're changing the world and that we have to be changing the world because the world is not going to change itself and we're ideally positioned to really get some things done here um so topic of the talk is real world asset nfts which we talk about as raw nfts and climate change how these two things combine you're using a structure called a product information market which is a new way of thinking about how we discover things about the world and how we price information uh and with that said let's go over to the slides [1:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV0y3eZrVtg&t=118s) so the first thing i'm going to talk about is this concept of donut economics so the world as a whole can emit sustainably about 16 gigatons of carbon which is roughly two tons of carbon per human being and at 16 gigatonnes uh we would be consuming 40 of the carbon we're emitting now which is 40 gigatons or about an average of five tons per human being eight billion people five to twenty each forty gigatonnes um forty gigatons will wreck agriculture probably within about ten years nobody's sure exactly how much carbon we can put into the atmosphere before the non-linear dynamics of the atmospheric system basically whip us into submission um this is extremely dangerous and we don't really know where the limits of that system are because the fossil record is not a guarantee about what will happen in the future so we're squeezed between the need to do more social good with the resources that we're burning and uh the need to can radically reduce our resource burn before we break agriculture and this wedge is talked about is being done by economics so um the trap that we're in is that since 1900 human population roughly tripled and just over half of that population has moved into a lifestyle which is high burn um and unsustainably high burn the average urban citizen of most cities in the world has a co2 footprint of about eight tons as higher in some places much higher in some places lower than others um so this is the development pipeline this is basically we have this model that we pull people out of poverty and then into the cities but the problem is that those cities are inherently unsustainable and it's not clear even with the incredibly fast reduction in the price of solar that we can get that format to full sustainability without other radical changes right we're in a position where it's very very uncertain that we know a way forward with this mess um if we look forward the next kind of 30 years from now there are a whole variety of different paths forward right various kinds of approaches to do radical cutting by reducing our consumption this is this kind of eco favela model breaking urbanism maybe you run your cities on self-driving cars and robots and it's all great uh there's also the kind of nuclear green and geo-engineering faction we think that we're basically going to enclose nature in a machine [4:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV0y3eZrVtg&t=268s) and then create a sort of optimum condition for nature we don't really know which way this goes so it's easier to think about the immediate problems and how we can get rid of the slack and the waste in the systems because whatever we do to reduce waste automatically frees up potential for all of these different strategies to work but i want to impress very clearly that we can't ignore this if we don't successfully execute one or more of these strategies we're going to break agriculture within the lifespan of not only our kids but our lifespan um it's it's really pretty dire right there if you talk to the climate people [5:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV0y3eZrVtg&t=305s) so what we need is kind of a miracle we need a zero-waste economy that is still capable of rapid economic growth and we need the economic growth because without economic growth the poor stay poor and right number the poor right number the rich somewhere between two and four to one and we've got about a billion people started so our economy basically has four phases investment consump production consumption and waste and then there are some feedback loops like return on investment the problem that we have right now is this system is wasting a gigantic amount of the resources that go into it resulting in things like landfill and it's failing to produce enough growth to give everybody some reasonable degree of comfort so we have a system which is both not growing fast enough and also producing too much damage for the current rate of growth you need a really radical reason from this um [5:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV0y3eZrVtg&t=357s) the reason it looks this way is because when we designed this economy we had near infinite amounts of coal and oil a relatively small population and nature was pretty undamaged by human activity up until that point where we get going about 2 300 years ago when the human population was tiny compared to current levels and you know we had no notion that we could even burn enough coal to cause any kind of climatic problem so what we're really doing is we're unpicking the assumptions that underpinned the coal economy and replacing them with a new economy which is actually fit for a purpose in the world that we're going into and the world that we're going into is ten billion people radical resource constraints incredibly fast accelerating technology it's not that there's no way out of this jam it's just if we don't do something like getting out of the water we're gonna drought but it's not like we don't have ways of getting out one of the most critical things that we can do on this is we can start closing loops on the economy so for example steel is about 70 recycled it just goes round and round and round and round and if you steal the seventy percent recycling how hard would we get to get steel 99 recycling same thing for aluminium same thing for polypropylene we could start designing an economy where we reduce the number of basic materials that we use and we aggressively recycle those basic materials at which point we can then take all this abundant cheap solar energy and use it to pay for the radical transformation of those materials as they go through product after product after product we could also start designing products which last for entire lifespans rather than designing products with a three year lifespan or a five year long spot there are a whole bunch of things we can do to close up these loops close the gaps and get us to this dream which is a rapidly growing zero-waste economy now here's where the fun begins so my suggestion is this if we're going to get a rapidly growing zero waste economy what we need to do is we need to instrument the economy so right now we've instrumented the financial economy down to the penny because we have a very accurate conservation of mass inside of the financial system money just doesn't mysteriously come into existence without being on somebody's books neither does money vanish without being on somebody's books everything is correctly monitored and owned and we've got really big complex social structures for doing that so my suggestion is that we could apply a similar kind of engineering approach [8:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV0y3eZrVtg&t=507s) to nail down the structure of the economy so that we don't continually leak wealth through all of these cracks and this means a full integration of financial and ecological data so that we track our impact data in exactly the same way as we track our spend we know where every penny is and we know where every gram is and that is not nearly as ambitious a goal as it sounds because the computing technology that allowed us to do accurate tracking of all the world's money was pencil and paper it was quill pens and now we have you know petaflops of uh you know compute power and near infinite storage this should not be that hard we've got the tools so [9:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV0y3eZrVtg&t=549s) what we've built at Mattereum is a product information market and we started where product information is immediately valuable which is things like gold bars collectibles fine art and other areas where there's an enormous amount of fraud there's about two trillion dollars of fraud in consumer markets globally and we can basically make a living getting rid of that two trillion of fraud what we're basically doing to achieve that is very closely parallel to what we did with ssl certificates in the 1990s to fuel ecommerce you take insurance you bind it to cryptography you then demonstrate the proof that you have the insurance in the user interface and users the little padlock in your browser bar actually indicates an insurance policy we do something similar for products what we do is we wrap the products in [9:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV0y3eZrVtg&t=595s) multiple layers of different digital certificates from different kinds of experts including the people that are stamping out fraud and the people that are doing the ecological damage destination and those two structures together you know they're married inside of the same data transfer rail so you have a single rail which handles what the product is and all the ecological information and all the social impact information and why the thing is valuable and all of that stuff is represented in formats which can be either very analog and very manual or you can go right the way through to xml and json data representations uh using all that old wonderful stuff from semantic linked data proper old mod technology semantic data is amazing but it's not something that's heavily developed right now so the crux of this is that if we're right and we begin to build these kind of product information markets for physical goods in the long run we round up with a map of where all the human race's environmental impact is and once we have that map what that opens up is a variety of [11:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV0y3eZrVtg&t=662s) potential policy options both for private individuals companies and even governments and indeed the global level that can point us in lots of different directions because once you have a decent instrumentation of the economy you can figure out what happens when you change things um you could do simulations you can projections you can do modeling this is a slide from a thing called the spread scenarios spr ead from an organization called demos helsinki their website is demosta fi and they've done a ton of work on modeling radically politically different futures all of which fit inside ecological constraints it's amazing work um [11:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV0y3eZrVtg&t=703s) so the final thing i want to just point out very briefly is this is the climate shelter work that i started 20 years ago called the hexagon we started with a building that was about six feet high and we've just improved the design and improved the design and improved the design so over 20 years that open source project now houses tens of thousands of people every year burning man it's got refugees living in a few places it's got homeless people living in it in la you can see early launchpad.org has details about that um i do intend to actually ship real change here right we've done it for the sheltering if somebody came to me tomorrow morning and said we need shelter for 50 million people i can give them a template and tell them what to do right it's not an engineering problem anymore no it's a political problem it's a question of policy and will so the intention to do something substantial about climate it's not my first rodeo of this right we know what we're doing we know how to do it and if we get the appropriate um support and people begin to understand how important this model is i think the blockchain community as a whole can reinvent itself as the people that are managing climate change and the people that understand how to deliver a zero waste rapid growth economy okay could we kill the slides okay great thank you so this sounds crazy ambitious right i mean it sounds like wait what you're crazy there's no way but back in the early 1990s there was no dns right you you still had internet access but there was no dns people literally emailed each other spreadsheets of domain names and ip addresses and you would load that onto your local host and that would give you access to the web without having to constantly look up ip addresses and one summer some folks set up the dns servers in the university i was at and suddenly we had dns and instead of emailing each other spreadsheets all that information got handled at the system administrator level through distributed database right same thing in the late 1990s i knew the people that shipped the first virtually successful https web server before that there was no e-commerce after that there's e-commerce and that e-commerce is the fundamental support for all of the value on the internet facebook is advertising for e-commerce google is finding things and selling advertising for e-commerce um amazon is the e-commerce and that's pretty much all the wealth on the internet from a single cryptographic primitive but people that i know designed and [14:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV0y3eZrVtg&t=853s) launched so now we're in a position where we've got to do something about this climate thing we just have to fix it it's not if it's not when it's not it's not bad it just has to get done but until we've figured out a kind of tinkertoy technology which fixes that problem there's no way that we can then scale it in the way that we did for dns and in the way that we did for e-commerce using ssl certificates um so that's the story we can't do this and this is what the blockchain is about now --- End of [723] "Saving the Climate with Real World Asset NFTs" by Vinay Gupta | MoneyDance 2020. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [730](https://guptaoption.com/texts/730.md) The Bitcoin Podcast Interview #343- Vinay Gupta CEO Of... (2021); the most closely related, [714](https://guptaoption.com/texts/714.md) Autonomous A1 - Taming Capitalism with Vinay Gupta of... (2021); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.