# The Bitcoin Podcast Interview #343- Vinay Gupta CEO Of Mattereum (part 2 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [730], part 2 of 2. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2021-03-20 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4. 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): Mattereum legal context.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - CheapID (2006): Design for a sub-$1 identity card, written for the US Office of the Secretary of Defense, that keeps...
  - UKJT Digital Dispute Resolution Rules (2021): Consulted on UK rules for resolving disputes over smart contracts; Mattereum is quoted in them.
  - The Future We Deserve: "Facebook for the Five Billion?" (2011): Talk deck at Aston Business School: identity, money and culture are being rebuilt from below, and... (suggested by machine)
  - 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)
- 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.
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - cyber and defense: Security work for defense clients, built on one idea: set rivals to check each other. Resilience and Opportunity in...
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products.
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (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 (20%); Crypto history, e-gold & digital money (20%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (13%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: NFT (27 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); Ian Grigg (7 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); Ricardian contract (3 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); interoperability (3 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); SEC (4 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); Mattereum (12 here; 127 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); New York Convention (2 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); contracts (12 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); smart contracts (7 here; 110 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); Shatner (2 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.49 (1.00 is the top), number 94 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [692] [Vinay Gupta:From Global Resilience to Practical... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/692.md): same career work: CheapID
  - [31] [guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php (2006)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/31.md): same career work: CheapID
- On the same works, just before: [723] ["Saving the Climate with Real World Asset NFTs" by Vinay... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/723.md); [233] [Quaddome (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/233.md); [738] [The Bitcoin Podcast Roundtable #343--Vinay Gupta of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/738.md)
- On the same works, just after: [160] [UKJT Digital Dispute Resolution Rules (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/160.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: The Bitcoin Podcast Interview #343- Vinay Gupta CEO Of Mattereum, video, 2021-03-20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [730], https://guptaoption.com/texts/730.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[42:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=2547s) so if you have a 500 ounce sorry 400 ounce gold delivery bar you turn the bar into an nft we've got all this lovely court machinery to make sure that the nft really does control the bar and then you just turn your bitcoin into wrapped bitcoin toss it into a smart contract and walk out with gold bar and you've suddenly hedged any risk that you were carrying is now hedged like that much gold okay and you know this is a game changer because the gold industry the gold entry is desperate for this bitcoin thing to get exposure to this thing to get into the game to figure out how to make their shiny metal relevant to these crypto lunatics and their enormous beautiful dream and the answer to that is like look why if the objective is eventually to get away from state issued money why is it that every time somebody wants to exit something to control their risk they'll end up exiting into dollar-denominated staff right why would why why exit a non-state currency into a state currency they are not state currency into gold like normal people that make sense yeah what if what if bitcoin allows smart contracts in the future like i think corey talks about taproot and how i guess i don't know would you would you do that options there yeah yeah i mean i i got nothing against i mean uh tap rotten top root and rootstock are they the same thing no rootstock is a federated chain that is a basically an evm clone with a pool of validators that ties into bitcoin yeah and so it's more like a side chain where uh taproot is the implementation of store signatures in a more complex scripting system inside bitcoin which has which remains to be seen whether or not it actually gets implemented into the bitcoin core protocol okay got it got it yeah i mean we don't need that much smart contract firepower to make Mattereum work so yeah i mean doing it in something that is kind of sidechain like i would worry a little about the stability of that but if it gets built into bitcoin core and it's capable of doing basically extend i mean the the minimum that we need to get something to happen is extendable arrays are you are you familiar with merkley's abstracts and tech trees yes that's what it is okay oh yeah i've wrote an

[44:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=2697s) article on it today you can do it it's it's probably even more privacy preserving than other smart contracts because you don't expose the entire tree of options just the one that's actually done yeah yeah yeah oh wait wait wait hang on so the whole tree goes in at the beginning and then you're just moving around like it's almost like a state diagram yeah ah that was a little tricky i was assuming that you could modify the tree and upload a new tree that's the state transit i'd have to take a look at the detail i mean it sounds like it's roughly equivalent to a finite state machine i'd have to yeah i don't know doesn't matter but i mean the bottom line is that we don't need much power and if it has enough power then binding this stuff directly into bitcoin absolutely because you know there's no need for additional layers of complexity if all you want to do is move real rights around like legal rights are not inherently difficult to shove from one system to another system you know the law is designed to work like you know if you write your signature on a piece of paper it doesn't matter whether it's a beer mat or not the law will recognize it so similarly if you've got some way of expressing what your legal intent was in a durable form then there shouldn't be any problem getting the courts to recognize it and if the courts recognize it then you can move property around in a vault system yeah yeah i think that's kind of the thing the the beautiful thing about your approach is like the court system doesn't work i just maybe i'm not saying the right words here but i feel like it doesn't work as much on consensus as it does precedent like once the president is there then other courts are just gonna go to the president that's set and either pivot off of it or use it so um well i mean it's not it's don't rocket surgery at the end of the day right like are you the rightful owner by contract flaw of this you know one kilogram gold bar yeah i bought it here's the money i paid for it here's the person that i paid for it uh you know that i paid for it you know here's my documentation that i did that transaction here's my statement i didn't do give it to anybody else you know you're just amassing evidence for somebody some common sense decision which is you paid for it therefore it's your property and as long as we've got you know a nice clean paper trail when everybody understands what they're buying before they put their money down courts have no reason to object to that because it's just a continuation of what you know rightful reasonable business

[47:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=2847s) looks like you know because we're not i mean because we're dealing with physical property in the transfer of ownership of physical property we don't have to directly embrace the philosophical complexity of what is a cryptocurrency you know if we were issuing a token the question is well so what is the real legal standing of this token and then there's no jurisdiction to make one decision no no whereas if it's just like who owns this gold brick that is sort of a question the courts are really well designed for dealing with and it's largely a question of intent and execution of intent and you know the intent is that i will sell you this gold brick in return you will give me a car we both agree that that was our intention we both agree that we attempted to do it we discovered that something got screwed up in the software and the software is now broken you still want to give me the car and i still want to give you the gold brick a judge just comes in and says yeah yeah we understand the blockchain contract was all screwed up we understand both parties are very happy for the transaction to go ahead as planned cancel the contract do this instead you know it's it's not asking the courts to do anything the courts aren't super comfortable with they just need a little help with the technology unfortunately this uk jurisdiction task force stuff really helps because it it gives a very clear understanding of how the uk court system wants this stuff done it's super radical that is so interesting yeah it's very very deep in the woods it's deep in the kind of nerdy backwaters of reality that this stuff is happening but when you change the way that the machinery of justice works even very small ways the fate of nations is affected because now the uk is probably the best place in the world to hold crypto assets it's interesting how like i was reading like a little bio about you finney and you talk about how i guess when you were younger when you were 25 you were more of a libertarian and now you've kind of shifted a little bit i guess yeah yeah not quite um i guess we have some some very short questions and then we'll kind of wrap it from here um i have a questions i don't think the phrase nft sticks i just think it's too i mean what do you think i don't think it's like marketable i think it's kind of like it's weird someone's like hey is

[49:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=2997s) there nft for that you're like what isn't that the little code on the back of a soda bottle nft what are you talking about like yeah well if it doesn't stick what would we call them like d there's a there's a website called nifty they stole my idea they must have listened to the show and still not right we talked about that we went to an nyc nft uh right before the pandemic do you have a nifty nifty lefties 50s i mean ethics think of like you know a lot of people will still say gif right or they'll say you know jpeg or but we still say like pdf pdf stuck we don't think it's true right pdf did stick pretty good stick right but you know what it is yeah anyways the pdf is you know jpeg is much better than pdf right yes i like to propose a change that fillable pdfs should be fpdf and not just dot pdf because you don't know if you're sending the fillable one or the non-fillable one and then you run into like three days worth of hey i can't print this and fill this out so then it's like okay what the hell like and then you gotta go back and find oh i've got two copies this must be the fillable one so nerds everywhere if you're listening can we change the attention to fpdf so that everyone knows it's a fillable pdf and you know it would just help everyone it would help the whole [ __ ] world so that idea came from me it's good [Laughter] i would say maybe maybe you make it p-h-d-f and then it could be fiddif just something different because i send way too many pdfs and i can't get i can't do anything with this i'm not at a printer i'll see you in two days and i'm like it's a pillow pdf yeah um i i mean i i reckon with this what you'll get is there'll be some overwhelmingly gigantically successful thing that will come out of the nfts and it might well be these top shots so it could be that the you know the regular world will just call the nft's top shots and oh no we'll leave a little copyrighted fist in the air no only our thing is the tough shot and everybody has a true i don't know man uber rocks and kleenex whatever dude do you have any ketchup oh man so it couldn't be all gets known or some other brand has a huge hit and that's how it becomes named i think nfp is it's okay it's okay it's not too bad um

[52:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=3147s) jesse also has a question you'd like to ask okay uh i i've been thinking about modifying it but we'll deliver it as is it's it's uh is what you do actually difficult i mean over the course of a working day i will go from you know worrying about where the javascript is going to be stored for a thing to um trying to figure out where we're going to get physical vaulting arranged for a new asset class you know okay and in the middle there'll be a whole bunch of you know discussions about can we potentially do this using a zk snark based you know layer two solution so the thing which is hard is you know i need total systemic knowledge about maybe six or seven disciplines you know i need to know a ton about insurance i need to know a ton about you know the smart contracts i need to know a ton about the underlying property rights uh the physical vaulting the custody arrangements it's just knowledge across a huge range of different fields interlocked into a kind of seamless process um and you know we're now Mattereum is now large enough that i've got specialists in almost all of those areas fairly on top we still need somebody who's really knowledgeable about vaulting at art storage i'm sure somebody that just knows exactly how to get that done in specific ways so if anybody's listening to this and has a background in the vaulting industry please be in touch um but the yeah i mean it's it's the diversity of knowledge and being able to maintain a story consistently across all those different disciplines so it forms an integrated product this is the hard part of what i do thank you for being honest yeah that is one thing i uh if you have any advice how do you maintain that breadth and that interconnect in interconnectivity of the knowledge and being able to functionally apply it how do you do that um i took basically everything that i could out of my life that was not immediately relevant right and i don't mean like i stopped watching tv and i live like a monk but like i don't touch my calendar

[54:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=3297s) somebody else does my calendar for me right i try not to respond to emails unless i'm the only person that can do that let somebody else handle it right so to make the mental space what i had to do was externalize out all of the things that were sources of mental noise to the point where i could put my attention firmly on that problem and basically nothing else so i do probably a third or maybe two thirds less of the things that ceos typically do because those functions have gone out to other members of my team and that makes time for long and uninterrupted blocks where i can actually think about things and do this very detailed analysis of like where does this go where does this go how do these things relate to each other i don't know enough about this i need to go talk to some and so it it's just this thing of making the space for the research that is the critical thing about being able to get the depth um because the ceo role is typically that one is extremely busy and very fast-moving and it's all about the cycle time and how much you could get through in a day and unfortunately these kind of highly complex problems this is a dead end if you're going to be the decision maker on this stuff you have to make the time to do the research and the thinking and i think in a lot of companies what happens is that the ceo then hires people to do that for them and then goes back to being the busy guy that takes care of everything i'm hoping to do this other way around where i hire an operations person who is going to be the busy guy and i can continue to do this kind of shift navigation function you know across these kind of you know astral realms of infinite complexity thank you because i mean there's some great stuff coming down the line like you know i'm fascinated by the mixing of um radio opaque epoxy resin into radio transparent epoxy resin so you take these two epoxy resins you swirl them around in a cup to make a kind of complex mixture and then you smear it on the back of something that you're going to do like a sculpture on top of like the base of a sculpture or at the frame of a painting or actually the canvas of the painting and then if you take an x-ray of the thing you know you've got this kind of fractal swirling complexity to allow you to identify it for sure the next time somebody takes a look at it and all you need is a cheap x-ray machine they're not that expensive so you know i really want to get into the nerdy detail and like oh could we manufacture things i could use that in injected molded plastic

[57:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=3447s) you know you swirl in the x-ray into the injection molded plastic and then you'd basically take a cat scan of you know a cubic meter of let's say toys right and every single toy has an individual footprint fingerprint because it's made out of this swirl you know like so you know you you just don't get to think those kind of thoughts if you're doing 75 things in a day i agree you need the space to be able to really focus on things and say well why that's very interesting so in other words you delegate very well um i got better at delegating after several years of being bad at it it takes some failures to get good and that's right yeah i've gotten i mean i've gotten to the point to be honest it's not so much that i got good at it it was the people around me got used to me just throwing them plates and them having a cast i'm i'm thinking about something right now anton i mean my poor managing director that guy's run into the ground i'm trying to find somebody for him to hand off to because anton is the guy that did the majority of the work on getting the uk jurisdiction task force interface between us and Mattereum between Mattereum and us them set up you know anton was the guy that actually ran most of that interface for us he's very very good at doing things like justice reform that's his previous career he's a court reformer um so you know he's currently i need to get ant on back onto the justice track which means we've got to figure out who's going to be the busy guy um but yeah i mean it's been very much a process of me just externalizing huge amounts of the actual busy complexity stuff just to get the uninterrupted blocks of time to actually figure out what we're doing yeah i've never found the the verbiage for that until i recently read a popular book on the matter called deep work by cal newport it gives like a really good he puts words and structure to that concept of making the space for um like concentrated thinking and not context switching yeah yeah because you can't get anything done of like any real complexity or difficulty without doing that and if you are always context-switching you can never get to the point where you can do those things i read that book on your recommendation saved my life uh our last uh i guess our last last uh i'll get that out of the way so we can we can chitchat for as long as we need

[59:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=3597s) to and 10 words or less could you describe nfts um so i'm going to give two descriptions right so the legal description is going to be an nft is a transferable property right typically tied to intellectual property but also tied to physical stuff right transferable property right um but the the civilian thing the customer definition of the nft is it's that thing in my phone you know it's the icon in my phone that i paid money for right i think ordinary people NFTs look way more like apps than they look like same music you know because an app is a thing like it's an icon and you pay money for it and it sits on your phone and lets you do something so i think for the for most people the place where nfts will slot in their brains is right beside the app store rather than right beside itunes because people haven't paid for music by the song in a generation mostly they're doing this stuff by streaming now so you know the digital content you actually pay for in like specific lumps that's mostly apps these days it's a good concept to think about that in terms of required infrastructure something like that yeah because you know like the critical thing about the nft is it's a digital thing that you pay for and then you can sell it to somebody else well how much better would your experience of apps be if when you were done with an app you could sell it again no no i've already i've thought about this i've thought about nft since their inception well like i guess popular inception with cryptokitties when they made the standard the rc 721 yeah yeah um but and that kind of led the way with a lot of the other like blockchain specific useful applications uh and then i thought about things like software licenses and transferable software licenses for things like you know i i want to use this particular piece of software for specific time i'm done with it i'll transfer it that's that nft would be a decently useful uh incantation of that like there's there's that supply chain manufacturing and providence oh yeah they're enjoy there's a whole industry that could be reformed using that type of stuff oh absolutely absolutely i mean think of that mess with mortgage mortgage-backed securities where nobody could find the mortgage paperwork yeah it's interesting to see where this will possibly go and whether or not it may undertake or i mean overtake the original kind of

[1:02:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=3747s) uh pool of digital scarcity that was cryptocurrencies because i've i've thought about what that is in a lot of ways and like what that represents as like uh a proxy for value for a specific community um and how it differentiates differentiates itself from like unique value for a community yeah i mean i think you know the cryptocurrency is how you buy and the nft is what you buy you know it's it's a figure ground thing you know we've got pool of cryptocurrency but there's not much you could buy with the cryptocurrency then the nfd comes along and the nft is the thing you buy with the cryptocurrency i can see that yeah um because you think of the number of people that can now make a living with crypto that couldn't before we started having out artists making nfts and selling them you know we've just made it possible for i don't know 100 million people to have the potential to make a living selling nfts i don't know how many actually will but if you're a visual artist and there are a lot of visual artists suddenly you've got an entire new marketplace in crypto and those people are going to become probably the dominant players in crypto i think the crypto is going to be completely dominated by visual artists in the next two three years it will just be crypto is an art platform that did a bunch of finance stuff in the early days because culture you know culture is where it's at in terms of numbers of people that can get engaged right finance is like a tiny tiny corner of the world whereas movies is gigantic and nfts is like moving the crypto industry way towards movies you're going to go to crypto conferences and it's going to be a whole bunch of you know art folks and like half a dozen nerds in the corners whining about when it used to be that everybody used to bring their own wallets and people talk to code i think we're going to see a huge cultural dilution as the right brain people come in and they're like yeah yeah yeah yeah whatever just make it work i want to sell some toys um and then guys i have to wrap them for really i've got stuff coming right up good timing we got a rap too thank you for coming on thank you for coming back for a what is this the fourth time to the net well it's not really a network anymore but i know you we've interviewed you twice for the bitcoin podcast has been three times now and then hashing it out so here we go you know we're finally doing

[1:04:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=3897s) stuff you know it was theory theory theory theory and now we're actually finally shipping the bastard oh my god it feels good i'll let you it's a podcast so i just get to just enjoy all this [ __ ] yeah yeah time is coming thank you very much thank you gentlemen fantastic really enjoyed

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End of [730] The Bitcoin Podcast Interview #343- Vinay Gupta CEO Of Mattereum, part 2 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [160](https://guptaoption.com/texts/160.md) UKJT Digital Dispute Resolution Rules (2021); the most closely related, [692](https://guptaoption.com/texts/692.md) Vinay Gupta:From Global Resilience to Practical... (2019); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.