# The Bitcoin Podcast Interview #343- Vinay Gupta CEO Of Mattereum (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [730], 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, 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 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=0s) [Music] it's a bitcoin contest [Music] is [Music] bitcoin just getting to the point of like you're just getting to the point where like okay i have the poc for Mattereum this is where we go from here so you've been you've been doing some things since then i'd say well i mean you know in between then and now covered right like you know the world turned upside down took a little bit of our attention absolutely and you know now here we are right the vaccines are rolling out uh scheduled to get vaccinated towards the end of this month and at that point you know things return to normal right congratulations i'm a i'm a lowly house dweller that's slowing the totem pole of getting it you're not an essential worker bro i'm an essential worker yes outside of the united states it's a remote worker um i think last time one of the white beard benefits man you get vaccinated [Laughter] the last time i spoke to you i think we were kind of sharing a drink at like devcon was that four or defcon three the one in prague prague prague was fourth four yeah what are we up to now nine ten is it well i mean you know it's it's just the volatility right the whole the whole cultural mule shifts every bull run you know it's interesting to think about the factors behind them each time too because they're yeah there's an overlap but there's always like kind of various key triggers that happen

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=150s) i think they get significantly more sustainable like not sustainable that's not the word i'm going for real i know that's like very general and vague but the la 2017 was just like okay so [ __ ] tokens worth how much per token okay that's yeah this is getting out of hand but this is actually legitimate understanding at a deeper level than just people trying to make it make a buck right there's the people that are always trying to make a book those are always going to be the new people that are attracted to the space but this is you know institutions are gobbling it up not only to have it on the balance sheet but some of them to have it to play with um you know just governments are starting to be a lot more lenient towards it i mean it's just it's different this this time feels a lot different than the last time so let's just uh kick this off let's get it going do some podcasting all right in 10. today are you ready by the way well i need to talk to somebody he's got superman corey you want to lead in jesse you want to lead it yeah i'm good all right you do it you do it cory i'll do the next one in 10. hello everybody welcome back we have an interview today bringing back to the show mr vinay gupta from Mattereum uh and a bunch of other stuff but current project is definitely Mattereum you're spending a good portion of your time i'd imagine welcome back to the show for those who have not uh heard you on like previous episodes that we did on hashing it out or the bitcoin podcast why don't you give everybody a quick introduction as to kind of who you are where you came from what you do um well so um where i came from is a long story first you're being paid 100 and anonymous digital cash was 1999 which is a different kind of og situation um i was curious uh i was i was doing due diligence for chicago vc firm and i said hey digital cash is the future i want you to pay me any gold and they were like you were insane i'm like are you a vp aren't you they're like uh okay fine um so i hope those guys are now all very very very very rich they certainly should be um then i doodled around after 9 11 bouncing around basically between

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=300s) defense academia and charities mostly working critical infrastructure and crypto um talking things like genocide resistant biometric id card designs for the office of the secretary of defense this kind of stuff uh and then 2014 i decided it had enough of being around the military and i said sold this and i went off to join the ethereum team run the launch of ethereum did all the kind of project management and stuff for the release and then took off into the wilds as ceo of Mattereum which is doing digital identities for physical things what we used to say now we say we do physical nfts you found that changing that verbage has made it easier for people to understand what you're doing and how much do you like if so how much of that do you like give credit to the hype around what nfts are so i think that the nft thing is remarkably not that hypey you know the critical thing about nfts is they're regulatory unambiguous nfts are property they're not securities you can make them you can sell them a brand like the nba can come along and flog this stuff to anybody that's willing to buy it without any regulatory complexity so we finally have a crypto product that can be bought by main street without any weird questions about what is this you know it doesn't come with any complicated theology you don't have to believe in satoshi as a time traveler from the future sent here to save us from central government it doesn't have any you know kind of seedy silk road kind of thing of like oh well you know this this bitcoin was once used to you know buy cocaine it's dirty man you know like all of that kind of murkiness around crypto that kept main street out of it it's gone nfts are just squeaky queen look it's a trading card hey it's an art piece knock yourself out so you know i think that we shouldn't underestimate how much the totally legally just spotless structure of the nft is to how important it is that it's making that jump you know it's like we finally got something that's just you main street can use it you don't even have to ask what it is knock yourselves out and that's huge that's a totally new horizon for crypto yeah it is i gotta ask you a question it's a serious question um are you a time traveler uh no that's a much harder question you think it is possibly but maybe the only reason i ask is i went back and i listened to about a half hour the very first interview you did on our podcast the bitcoin podcast um and

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=450s) you said some things that are like so accurately true now uh one of the things that stood out to me was um you said that this whole thing starts with cryptocurrency but then there's gonna and it's just because of human i'd say um not ignorance what's the word i'm looking for when someone's like green behind the ears naivety yeah naivety uh that we're just gonna bucket everything into one umbrella of blockchain tech or crypto tech uh and now we're starting to see the branches get a little bit more defined like we have nfts now which is you know like you said it's going mainstream and we're finding better ways to more accurately uh define the the nuance between for like from tech to tech um and i just found it was amazing that you were able to kind of like predict what we're going through right now that have been five years ago um how did you do that like how did you see exactly what's happening today is pretty much exactly what you explained in that interview five years ago um so some of this is like this is the third round of the crypto revolution for me right the first round was in the mid-1990s when it was all about email cryptography and that kind of stuff then i kind of sat out the round of the revolution which was https certificates being deployed for the first time some friends of mine were very involved in that um then i was part of the eagle ecosystem which was a whole round of crypto history that most people forget but we get some of our absolutely core competences from the eagle days right there are concepts that were critical in those days that are still critical that are foundational in blockchain nobody ever talks about eagle so you

[9:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=562s) know there was the eagle revolution and then you know i've largely sat out bitcoin because i knew from eagle that currency alone was not going to cause social transformation you know money is not enough you need the ability to build companies you need the ability to share risk right so you weren't going to see social change as a result of crypto until you had smart contracts and then when the ethereum train came along and it was like hey we're smart contracts i'm just like okay this is my stop here i get on um and that you know once you've seen it run a few times it's not so unpredictable you know there's there's a certain kind of just like okay we've done this before this happens then this happens and this happens and this happens and the drivers are kind of obvious so you have to go to burning man once in the early 90s duh duh will hell but also i mean like we're not 10 years into this thing right yeah you know i mean when was the white paper published originally it was in 2008 2018 implementation of 2009. dan suzanne right so we're 12 years into this thing we've probably seen what seven bull runs by now you know so what happens right a new thing comes along there is an enormous amount of speculation and everybody believes the new thing is the second coming um then you get the sort of arrival of these vulture like you know punk pump and dunk bastards who basically you know all got kicked out of multi-level marketing who decided they were crypto entrepreneurs um then the good things in the new thing become very diluted by idiocy and then people realize the new thing is maybe not the second coming and then it comes off the boil again but now you've got 10 times more people in the crypto space and every time we go through that loop it goes up by faster 10. now here what we just stick my neck all the way into the noose and say but i think this time it's different i have i have looked at it from a different lens uh i haven't been around as long as you but from my perspective at least with the last two or three bull runs um especially the last two is that a lot of it has to do with the identification of a standard which lowers the barrier of entry for people to do something new um that they're like they were uncomfortable with beforehand if you look at the ico boom that was the rc20 standard and all of the infrastructure built around it and the ability to like deploy um

[11:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=712s) a generally secure token uh that was able to interact with a bunch of things without having a tremendous amount of knowledge the same thing for nfts and then now once you have that you're able to like like signal boost the living [ __ ] out of it yeah yeah yeah absolutely and i mean interoperability is a very important part of this so you know if you go back to the the early days right remember the kind of the [ __ ] coin explosion like way back oh yeah big bitcoin clones oh my god so you know you'd just download the bitcoin source code you'd hack on 200 lines right you'd get some mates to do some mining with you and you suddenly go to shedcon so the only interoperability between [ __ ] coins was exchanges right and the [ __ ] coins themselves were kind of featureless apart from the fact that they were kind of representative of different kinds of communities so that sort of thing you know what i see with each one of these revolutions is that the interoperability becomes deeper and deeper and deeper you know the ability for me to take my project and wire up to your project and he you know you wire up to his project and he wires up to her project and suddenly all these pieces are working together you've seen this with d5 in a really gigantic way but d5 is still you know it's like taking the guts out of a high frequency trading system and then dumping it as a public api you know like nobody really understands defying less than a full-time professional financial engineer um and then we look at this nft thing that's happening in the nft thing is like you could explain it to a five-year-old and five-year-olds will get it faster than adults yeah absolutely i explained it to i explained it to um a close friend she's 18 she's trying to she's an up-and-coming artist and i was like hey you know you should give this a shot and i showed her i think it was wax or one of them and by that day she had already sold something for like seven bucks and i was like there you go like just make a thousand of those yourself seven thousand bucks like there you go so it um i don't know i'm kind of excited and you know it does feel different we were talking about it a little bit before the show this feels a lot different than 2017. so the nba thing i mean the nba thing is just like it's massive it's massive right

[14:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=862s) yeah so yeah it's a massive signal boost of like of of authenticity or legitimacy that um usually brings larger cohorts of people in that have since been sitting on the sidelines right likes when you have these like more often than not celebrity endorsements or people with a lot of um risk to bear endorsing such a thing then it's like oh well if they're doing it then i should probably look into it because it's now over the threshold of legitimacy for me that i can like reason that it's going to stick around for a long enough time i i think it's even more direct than that um two threads here let me let me open one and then talk to the other so the first thread is um have you read the contract that you get when you buy one of the nba hot shots come back to that in top i'll come over to that a second because that's a really interesting exercise so the other branch is just every other ip rights holder in america in the world is now just like that thing that the nba just did we do that with our stuff now you know and anybody that's got a substantial library back catalog video that's valuable any band that's got taped concerts any sports team uh any cartoon show you know any live-action movie like you know what do you do if they do like hey you know we're going to take the best 100 seconds of the matrix and we're going to sell them as nfts i'd buy it you'd buy it i'd buy it yeah you know so anybody that has ip can just take the you know tech and the contract right and you either get it from your dapper you get it from somebody else and off you go and the contract right the contract is fascinating because it very clearly defines what the right is that you're buying legally when you buy one of these clips it's an unambiguous legal framing this is our ip right this is the right that we grant you this is what you actually own in the event of a dispute it goes to this arbitration machinery and you know the the total clarity about exactly what it is you're buying that has never been there for things like bitcoin it's still you know what is the legal definition of bitcoin well you know you got the miners and you know you always have this feeling that when you're interacting with bitcoin you're interacting with an organic complex system that arose before it had a legal definition so you always have this sense of like it's like it's like a domesticated wild

[16:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=1012s) animal you know it's not like a cleanly defined legal object that has a you know like uh you know you know what i'm trying to say here like it's just because it came into existence outside of the wall the law tells a story about what it is but what is in the law's story these things are not identical whereas it was a generalization of what we had in a lot of ways like much like but i i've made i wrote an article a while ago that's kind of like i tried to frame this in the in the in the verbiage of quantum mechanics and how we treat matter as like both lights and particles like both of those concepts are concepts that are classical concepts but what we have in reality is something that transcends both of those things and bitcoin or cryptocurrencies was transl it transcended all the models we had we talked about money so it like further generalized the concept of these things and so when you try to use old frameworks to describe a new thing it's always going to be incomplete and when law is a part of that then it it really has an issue yeah absolutely i mean you know i used to say like cryptocurrency just means horseless carriage like whatever these things are they have a minor side effect which is that they create currencies but the actual underlying thing is so much more gigantically powerful than currency is to even call it cryptocurrency is already kind of an anachronism um you know there's there's a crazy wild power in this kind of technology because it's the only way of doing global synchronization of state you know you cannot make all the world's computers agree about anything that happens in time because they're running a seventh of a second delay from one side of the world to the other and the irreconcilable nature of that speed of light delay means that there is literally no way of getting two computers to agree about anything that happens in time unless the computers are within like six inches of each other so that smearing across time that you get like for human beings the seventh of a second delay between here in australia really doesn't matter and video conferencing software can kind of fudge that gap and make it all seem fine but if you've got an hft system that's doing 10 million trades a second that's smearing in time between australia and britain that's a one million trade gap it's a huge arbitrage opportunity for anybody who can go faster

[19:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=1162s) yeah it leads to the like the war of the cable length like yeah right and you know what the blockchain represents is the alternative to the war of cable length you know we're just going to take the time into these blocks all the transactions run at the same time in that block in an arbitrary canonical sequence and as a result we no longer have this smearing out across time of the transactions nobody's creating an advantage relative to anybody else based on information and you know the result is a fundamentally different computing architecture but it's also a fundamentally different political architecture and you know off the top you know that's like the enormous kind of mother lode and then we're kind of just like flaking chips off the edge of this to use as currencies yeah it's like we defined a measure um and that's huge it's like the first step to anything is defining a measure so wow when you put it like that see how man i love having you on the show i feel like i'm in office hours every time i feel like i'm um so let's just like this is the best segue ever Mattereum yeah how's it going with that there's an old album by a singer called annie defranco called living in clip right and you know it's about being on the road and you're just like you know the amplifiers are clipping because everything is too loud and you're just living in cliff right now i'm living in clip we are 10 days out from dropping the first two collections of physical nfts so one will be the infamous shatner project which has gotten delayed and pushed back so many times because of outside circumstances finally pray god ready to roll uh at that it's gonna be oh it's gonna be so much fun we have so much cool stuff tucked up our sleeves on this um so there'll be the shatner project and then there will be the gold project with our partners local wallet and that will be a bunch of gold brick nfts and for those you will be able to buy gold from loco and once the gold has arrived physically in their vault you can min an nft for your specific gold bar pop your art on it and then sell the damn thing um is backed by real gold or the gold is boxed by real art do you need the art i need a well

[21:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=1312s) i mean gold traditionally gets tasked with beautiful things right so even if you're just buying the gold brick because you want a gold brick and there are very good reasons for having a gold brick um then you know you might as well have a pretty gold brick if it costs vinay i've got a question you see did you see people's art piece that essentially transformed after the election result so how how impactful is that transformative nfts um so with all of this uh such a delicate line right so we're only at the very first evolution of asking what an nft is right and i think that what we'll discover a year from now is the nfts have broken into six or seven different things so this thing that we think was real-world asset nfts or physical NFTs some people call them delivery nfts you know those things in law are in the general neighborhood of being warehouse receipts it may not be exactly a warehouse receipt but in the general neighborhood warehouse receipts um whereas you've got other things which are like copyright licenses you know an nba hotshot top shot top shot top shot um is basically very close to an ip license right it's it's a funny kind of little use license more or less in the family of ip licenses then you've got things like you know the ones which transform and those are basically software you know you're buying something and you know what happens if you do something like taking a a very complex nft and you pack into the logic for something like a little adventure game you know you buy the nft you play the nft your state persists in the nft and when you sell it the next person you sell it to inherits your state you know oh my god what's like a tamagotchi right yeah and i've just been feeding this thing you know sugar pops all day long and its heart rate is like 320 bpm and it is going to be the worst behaved time of watching ever and then i sell it do you uh do you do you watch anime finae how could i not okay do you know hunter x hunter i do not know hunter x hunter okay watch that one right and then uh watch when you get to the there's an arc about something called greed island and basically the father of the main character left behind for him a game to play that kind of uh it it helps guide him

[24:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=1462s) toward uh evolving his character and also connecting with his father through like the state of the game that was last saved by the father oh whoa yeah that would be interesting i would just i would it'd be interesting for you to watch and then come back on the show and tell me what you think i've been trying to come up with uh the framework that i try and explain cryptocurrency or blockchain or whatever to people is usually it's like like well i guess you've had this question we asked all of our all of our guests uh describe bitcoin in 10 words or less you'll get it again or a version of it uh but it's like my version of that is typically it's digital scarcity that gives ownership and provenance in a lot of ways and that's but like if you think about what an nft is just add unique to it it's digital unique scarcity with ownership of providence and then however you want to use that tool to do real real world things that humans want to do and whatever interactions they have is like the sky's the limit and we're kind of just playing with that is that like do you see something wrong with that definition no not at all not all but it's an insider's definition right so that's that's somebody that's like lived through the crypto years right yeah you know the definition like you know you're looking at it from the side of having seen it evolve in history so when you see the thing you identify with the genealogy of ideas that led you there right for sure for the nine you know for every one of us there's nine of them who just walked into the room in the last three months and are like nfts are nfts and that's where it stops because they're defending they're gathering cards they're going to be like digital pokemon cards yeah but they're the critical thing is that they're defining it by its behavior and by their experience of it they're not defining it by how it came into existence in the history behind it and any categorization relative to other things for them it's just a thing in the environment that they've picked up and they're playing with because there's a real difference when you see something evolve from nothing through a degree you know layers and layers and building of ideas and so on because for you you look at it you see all the things that it evolved from but for the people that didn't see it evolve and it just lands they just pick it up by the handle and

[26:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=1612s) use it and that is it's it's it's such a different mindset for people that just stumble upon these things fully formed and then integrate them that way question sorry i have a lot of questions for you that i don't want to take time okay um ip uh when uh jack dorsey uh minted that nft by hal finney and sold it how do you mint a dead man's tweet what is the ip involved like what are the legal potential legal ramifications for nfts in the future involved with people taking other people's content and minting it for themselves and that artists themselves further diluting a one-of-one oh boy okay so um the sec right our good old friends the sec we have a simple way of defining what the sec's policy is towards any kind of crypto token

[27:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=1669s) and we call this the norwegian rule right the norwegian rule is this anything which is fun is either fattening or illegal uh sorry fattening or immoral right this is a joke that norwegians make anything which is fun is either fattening or immoral so if anybody wants to buy it the sec will decide it is a security that's basically how that works if they could possibly interpret it as being a security they'll interpret it as being a security and fortunately for the most part crypto has been beneath their notice they don't really care and we've done very nicely in that benevolent neglect thank you so similarly to that the test for copyright is not if you want to buy it's a security the test for copyright is if i do this with disney's content what happens so my recommendation in terms of this whole business of buying tweets and then reselling them as you know tweet derivatives or whatever these things actually are is let's just go do that with a whole bunch of disney things disney tweets clips from disney things that they've posted onto twitter's little videos whatever it happens to be let's just do this with a bunch of disney content and see what happens and if this you're like yeah that's absolutely fine we don't mind you doing that absolutely yeah you can sell our mickey mouse tweet all day long we don't mind it's good with us then at that point we know where we stand relative trying to talk to our property and we've established how things work okay so there's a disney litmus test yeah because disney literally owns us copyright lawmaking right every time it looks like mickey mouse is going to drop into the public domain disney pulls a rabbit out of the hat and gets another 20 years we've got extension on us copyright and they do that by massive long-term political strategic lobbying efforts because as soon as mickey drops out of copyright disney's entire thing begins to slide off a cliff um so you can bet the you know if they see people making money out of disney content that disney cannot access because the law doesn't really do what they needed to do the law will be changed because they are disney and their own culture that is an interesting perspective because i've seen in in video games where somebody takes accidentally accidentally copyright material and that creates a one-off of something that becomes essentially ultra valuable because in a system where they don't

[30:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=1819s) want to remove it from the system but they cannot make any more of it i think you have a you have a legally protected and artistically protected one-off like true one-off yeah yeah that's nice i like that that's interesting i have a question that is like i get i get stuck in this conundrum when it comes to physical nfts and i call it like the so what conundrum and it's like all right so i've got this gold bar and i also have this digital token that says that this gold bar is mine but what if somebody just like puts a gun in my face and takes my gold bar like i can't say like i've got this address here that says that that's mine they're gonna say like i don't give a [ __ ] it's mine now right so how do you get over that hump like and then furthermore i guess like what if i'm like hey i've got this address that's tied to that physical gold bar like do you want it for something else and what's to prevent me from just holding on to the bar and you buying my address that represents the bar and you go do stuff with it like it's almost like so the so what factor is like i don't care about your crypto wallet give me the bar that bar is mine in my hand absolutely what gets over that conundrum oh we just dispatched teams of ninja assassins in the two years ah i hadn't thought about it kind of out of the ninja assassin it turns out that you can rent ninja assassins really inexpensively they've been on a pretty downward you know they're not as popular as they used to be well no they're just much better at hiding but yeah no the um the source of ninja assassins that we use uh we rent them from an agency that hires out ninja assassins for really very reasonable fees and and that that entity is called the government right oh those guys those guys so it turns out if you know the correct implantation right if you know the correct incantations you could actually have the state deploy ninja assassins on your behalf to enforce your property rights get your gold get your gold so what we spent basically three or four years doing was figuring out how to run the entire architecture of violence

[32:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=1969s) created and maintained by the nation state as a peripheral attached to the blockchain like a laser printer might be attached to a macintosh hmm a lot of people don't know how laser printers are attached to macintoshes so you're gonna have to still use them though yeah that's a good point right you just plug the cable in and it goes well it turns out that you know contract law is pretty much the cable and as you just plug one end of the contract ball into the blockchain the other end of the control flow into the state and now the state will do its job and deploy ninja assassins pretty much on the blockchains say so we're going to have to go back to socialization well anyone who's been watching kind of the work you've been trying to do or look into even since probably before ethereum you've been following like the concept of ricardian contracts for a long time and how do you get the legal system into the blockchain and i think this is what the manifestation of that oh boy yeah i mean it's so the Ricardian contract remember i mentioned like way back in the beginning of time we knew all this stuff so ian grigg wow you know my friend dear gregor my friend dear Grigg um it just isn't an egg here right meeting Ian Grigg was one of the absolute high points of my entire career in crypto um i was at some blockchain for sustainable development shindig in london and i get talking to this kind of crotchety australian engineer dude over lunch and he's telling all these weird stories about trumping around in africa and doing this and that you know that crypto technology back in the old days he's got all these amazing stories you know finally at the end of it he hands me a business card and it says you know Ian Grigg and i'm like you're Ian Grigg you're the Ian Grigg and ian just stares at me like what i'm like i bought digi gold from you in like 2003 and he was like oh and i'm like you're famous and it was just hilarious it was like it was the first time that Ian Grigg had been famous but all of this all of this chapter and verse comes from me and Grigg right like everything that Mattereum did in phase one was one hundred percent ian grigg and then the second part you know we literally took in Grigg's ricardian contract model and we just implemented it thoroughly and then in the second part we're building new structures on top of ian's Ricardian contracts

[35:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=2119s) um so that that whole process right the ricardian contract ian was the guy that figured out that arbitration courts could be used to enforce cryptographic contracts

[35:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=2131s) and what is an arbitration court it's brought into existence by a thing called the 1958 new york convention on foreign arbitral awards which basically says that if you and i have a contract we can appoint a private judge to manage that contract in the event of a dispute and that private judge will be respected as a real judge in 158 countries or something like that 160. and you know that that structure that 1958 convention it's a completely integrated platform in law like nobody ever blinks they use it for everything it's not remotely controversial or unusual and it just turns out that ian figured out that you could use that to enforce cryptographic contracts as real contracts simply by selecting an arbitrator that understood them to be that and that's a fundamental plaque that is not going away the new york convention is pretty much in violet so good i'm sorry with the proviso there's been a lot of abuse of arbitration in america by corporations that were basically setting up kangaroo courts and i think that that will be one of our big operational problems um so like what's the holy grail moment for Mattereum success for you like when if Mattereum is used in a court of law like it and it protects the individual's property like what's the holy grail moment that you're building up to we we just we just had it um uk jurisdiction task force uk uh which was established the uk doesn't really have a written constitution so everything is a little squishier here

[37:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=2229s) but basically the uk jurisdiction task force is a thing that was created by the court system and the government to study ways you could make the uk's jurisdiction more legally relevant legally useful uh you have to read their mandate to exactly what they're doing but they um they spent a couple years trying to come up with an arbitration framework for ruling on disputes involving crypto technology smart contracts and crypto tokens i think they use the term crypto assets um and we spent a couple years in a long persistent engagement with those guys and the final set of regulations that they've put forward not regulation standards norms they've put forward uh has two or three critical things that we said were super important and they listen to us and they're in there or not just as those of the industry but we were certainly in the room um and so we've gotten pretty much uk government approval for the approach that we're taking involving the integration of cryptography and law it's a really big deal that set of rules says that the arbitrator who is overseeing one of these rulings can use a crypto key to award property from one person to another person if the underlying software technology allows it and they can do that in their role as a judge right now implication of that is this if we have an escrow contract and you know let's say that jesse makes the decision about which one of us is going to get the money out of the escrow if we think that jesse has done the wrong thing jesse can get sued so the person making the decision on the escrow is not fully legally insulated an arbitrator on the other hand in practically all countries is fully legally insulated in the same way that a judge is flew legally insulated so now you get into the escrow contract you take it to an arbitrator the arbitrator decides who will have the money sticks their ledger into their laptop does the transaction moves the money and the entire thing is finally completely settled nobody could overturn the arbitration because there is no appeal process and the money has been awarded directly by the arbitrator's hand and the arbitrator is legally insulated i mean this is spectacular power it's so much progress um because now you can just weld the crypto ecosystem right into the real world because we've got everything we need to do that

[39:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=2379s) how has happened as i said now that that's happened now that you've met that milestone that's quite drastic what's next what do you like what are you taking from there okay so we're gonna launch towards the end of this month here gold

[39:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yHqPmhv5Q4&t=2397s) bricks you could buy gold it goes into the vault once it's in the vault we transform it into an nft the bars are individually numbered and allocated which is incredibly important you can't be working with gold bars that don't have a number on them because if they don't have a number on them you have a claim on a bar but it's like a debt whereas if you do have a number it's not a claim in a bar the bar is your property right anytime you're working with gold allocated bars not not unallocated bars allocated bars so the thing that we are pushing here is a concept right and we're not the only people in this game but we're definitely leading this concept called ntfa and here i want to go out on a whim and say look the rivalry between bitcoin people and gold people is like two siblings in the back of a car poking each other with sticks right it is the dumbest thing on earth because bitcoiners and gold gold bugs these are natural allies right the people that believe the state should not control the money supply are like one percent of the global population and why inside of that one percent of the global population are they fighting with each other it's ridiculous right so what we are going to attempt to build out is an absolutely gigantic super highway between gold and bitcoin so that if you feel that you're taking too much risk on bitcoin you exit to gold and if you are getting bored with gold because the gold price moves like a snail on volume you might want to exit to bitcoin and for most investors your bitcoin to gold ratio is pretty much the only number that you need to adjust if you want to change your risk exposure to the global economy it's interesting no it's interesting that you chose that and not ethereum because like as you said you you saw eagle you came you were you participated in and these you know the predecessors right and and it seems like you you see so much opportunity in terms of what you can do with smart contracts on ethereum it's just surprising that you would you would create a system that interconnects bitcoin and gold well the system that interconnects bitcoin and gold is ethereum right okay okay it's nfts right so if you have a 400 ounce gold bar it's currently worth about 500 ether right seven eight seven or a hundred thousand dollars

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/730-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [730] The Bitcoin Podcast Interview #343- Vinay Gupta CEO Of Mattereum, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.