# Trust models, founding Mattereum, and 'Turning Law into Code' | Vinay Gupta | Conversations Clips

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [733]. 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, 2021-07-23 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc. 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): Origin story of the contracting layer.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Copyright and the digital economy: a case for reason (2010): Short paper proposing land law, with rights of way and trespass, as a better model for copying than theft:... (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:
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (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: Smart contracts, law & arbitration (18%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: collectibles (7 here; 27 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Shatner (6 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); William Shatner (4 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2019, 1 undated); repudiable payments (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); Through the Looking Glass (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); code is law (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); commodities (3 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); internet money (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); skin in the game (1 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); product information (1 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2019, 2 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.18 (1.00 is the top), number 380 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [556] [ETHCC24: 'Selling physical things using NFTs: what we... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/556.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
  - [554] [RWA for Emerging Markets (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/554.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
- On the same works, just before: [723] ["Saving the Climate with Real World Asset NFTs" by Vinay... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/723.md); [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)
- On the same works, just after: [773] [Vinay Gupta — Incentive-based epistemology | Ideamarket... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/773.md); [717] [The Novum Insightful - Ep1: Vinay Gupta | CEO of Mattereum (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/717.md); [762] [MetaGame meets Vinay Gupta (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/762.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: Trust models, founding Mattereum, and 'Turning Law into Code' | Vinay Gupta | Conversations Clips, video, 2021-07-23, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [733], https://guptaoption.com/texts/733.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc&t=0s) in 2017 you became you basically founded material and then maybe um i'm just going to say some words that basically like are some phrases that that kind of comes from it so humanizing the singularity organizing the world's property and making it universally acceptable and useful and then uh this is from the white paper turning code into law so and then it asks basically or answers what if code really did have the force of law behind it and so i guess talk about how i mean how you first really just said yep this is what's happening from the ethereum but then as well maybe you want to preface it from what is a smart contract because maybe some people wouldn't be yeah that's a yes that's a really great

[0:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc&t=46s) question let me do a little framing and then we'll get into this for sure so this idea of you know what's email money around right if you think of this whole blockchain thing as the next media type that the internet eats you know netflix eats tv spotify eats radio right bitcoin should have just eaten backing right yeah yeah yeah and it should just have been the californian ideology rolls over another industry no hiccup right but because of all this libertarian crap on the front end of it it basically covered itself in antibodies and then injected itself into the bloodstream and everybody said no whereas if they'd just been like hey the internet does money everybody would have said yes right and you know it's a strategic wonder of the worst kind right it's you know it's already set the technology back half a generation but the technology is so good that it's survived and this is the underlying philosophical split between the people that say blockchain and people who say bitcoin right right but it hasn't been made fully explicit right right and i you know it's it's just you get to a fork in the path you have to pick a side yep right um so then we come along to this whole question of code is law right if we're going to have a system where we're emailing money to each other okay it'd be nice if we didn't wind up getting caught up in somebody else's legal system every time we did that absolutely every sovereign state yeah right exactly because i don't know where you live because i'm just emailing you money right and if it turns out that it breaks the law in the jurisdiction that i send it to you're going to get into trouble because i emailed you money this is not helping us right so it'd be nice if we had some sensible approach to jurisdiction yes something that would give us some ability to handle this as a set of contingencies so think of something like consumer protection law in germany germany has incredibly strong consumer protection just unbelievably strong consumer protection um so there are lots of things which if you did them in america wouldn't raise an eyebrow but in germany the person that you've sold the goods to could just say change my mind take this back could be almost money right and so you need some way of knowing that you're doing business in germany even though you're just sending money to somebody over the internet right that's a problem for a computer right

[3:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc&t=194s) right it's not for you and i to keep up with and continue to think of yes right in an ideal world a piece of software understands i'm in belize you're in berlin right i send you the money in exchange for you sending me you know your uncle's cufflinks or whatever it is yeah right and you know a little message pops up on our computers and this is by the way you know you realize this will be regulated by consumer protection laws and the person the other side of the deal is 30 days to change their minds right end of discussion you want to escrow the money in this instance rather than make the payment because the return may be demanded yep okay fine now we're compliant right it's a job for a machine and it's a job for the machine in exactly the same way that route planning is a job for a machine right you get your phone out it's got gps it tells you how to get where you're going when you get off a plane in some place you've never been before right you get on this bus and you get a ticket here and you go there and you do this thing perfect right that's what you want not integrated enough that i can just make the payment for the tickets on my phone but boy how do you that's the next step right it is get off a place i've never been buy me ticket tell me where i go get off of this bus get on this train get on that bus now you're at your destination right or if you prefer to get an uber because uber of course doesn't let you pay for the ticket wherever you are in the world on the same device in the same interface on the same infrastructure yep as we've been even using here in london see what we're saying right so how much of that process is just that you're in this kind of mystical uber jurisdiction where wherever you are in the world uber works the same way but public transport works a different way yep right you'll pay because it just is the same everywhere you go same thing with airbnb right there's a pseudo jurisdiction in which it doesn't matter where you are the user experience is the same that's what we want from internet money yeah we just want money that works the same wherever you are and some combination of software and bureaucracy takes out all the lumpy bits to leave you with a uniformly smooth experience right that's what we need to do next right now this gets us to this question smart contract right um if you're going to be producing systems at this level of complexity you need to be able to automate not just the payment but you need to be able to automate the contract around the payment yes the entire from beginning to to end so it's a simple smooth system yep right so you know because this sounds

[5:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc&t=344s) completely naive but all of the money in the world lives inside of contracts or similar wheel containers right other than like you know spare change in your trouser pocket everything else is wrapped up inside of legal agreements right your income that comes in comes inside of a set of employment agreements you know when you make a payment to the power company you know that's inside of a 60 page contract you signed when you signed up with pg e um you know if you give money to a charity you know as soon as you drop that coin into the jar it's suddenly covered by a different regulatory structure than when it was spare change in your pocket right right you know as soon as it crosses the horizon it's now you know right to the charities commission it's a 501c3 it has to demonstrate what it did with your money there's an accountability chain like money almost never exists in a free state right it's always trapped inside of some kind of um contractual container or legal container right so if we just model money but we don't build a software analogy of all those legal containers and all those contractual containers all the legal and contractual containers exist exactly the same way they did before we get very little benefit from automating money right right if bitcoin just allows me to make payments but every single one of those payments is accompanied by a 60-page paper contract how far forward are we and so something

[7:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc&t=427s) that uh Mattereum is is developing right now is basically a proof of concept with some of these trust models is and it deals with our old friend from star trek uh william shatner and his collectibles and then also the stradivarius guitar uh violins excuse me so talk talk about how this like proof of concept is moving forward okay so we have this kind of philosophical realization that the blockchain is the natural architecture for the internet of money right we basically sever the libertarian story from the head end of that they've had a shot it hasn't worked maybe if the door collapses bitcoin does go to five million dollars but i don't think that's how this goes right um you know let's just see what happens with that though but assuming that we don't see a complete crash of the global financial system or rebasing onto bitcoin that doesn't mean it's the end of the blockchain story because you still need a global computer system which enables point-to-point trade without going through massively expensive international third parties right you know 50 of the world's commodity trading is done in you know high frequency trading systems and those high frequency trading systems are mostly in america there's no way that that's going to be true in 20 years ah yes right we are almost looking through the looking glass of what's coming it's just inevitable like why would the chinese and the europeans trade all their commodities in america put all their money in all their assets under american law leave a chunk of it on the table in the states like there's no way that continues yeah right eventually you're going to wind up with the globalization of trade and the globalization of trade requires a system where everybody is participating on the same basis yes and that transformation takes you into architectures that look like blockchain right it's i can't i can't stress enough how inevitable it is because if you politically decentralize you can't then technically decentralize without dealing with the speed of light problem or so in that physics problem you see what i'm saying right yes so you know the shift of geographic power where everybody has control in their own country and then we network immediately exposes you to this problem that you can't synchronize the computers right right right so whereas if it's all happening inside of a single trading location like okay this machine this building in connecticut that's the commodities exchange that's where all the deals happen which is basically the current architecture those kind of models are cut and dried you move the money you

[9:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc&t=577s) move the authority into one building all the computers are cables which are measured to the millimeter job is done right if you're going to have all that decision making and all those your trade happening in the countries where the assets live those countries are far apart you have a light speed delay you can't use that kind of architecture you need a different architecture the only computer systems that we have that are really compensated for this light speed delay problem or blockchain systems or google spanner but you can't use that for trade okay right um so you know this is the this is the inevitability of something that looks like this right it's just inevitable so the libertarian transformation of society was a hypothesis being tried turns out that we're not rolling in that direction right now on the other hand the globalization of trade has been a fact from a centuries we've gone through four accelerations of that in recent history with containerization and finance and the internet and all the rest of this there's no doubt about the direction of travel so having seen all of that the question then was how do we get skin in the game how do we get involved in that process and we started out with a very ambitious quite libertarian flavored approach this is kind of how we're going to do things as a libertarian vision flagged last year we began to realize that okay there's very little chance that we're going to see this kind of global blockchain republic type thing come into existence the question was okay how do we maintain our grip on the global trade transformation given that we're not going to be in the process of creating this kind of para sovereign core structure how do we do that so what we decided was we were going to go right to the other end of the scale still keep all the original Mattereum concepts about rule of law regulation and smart contract but apply them to things which are granular and atomic yes right so what's the smallest unit of law that you want to travel with an object as the object is shipped around the world and that's the definition of the object right or authenticity of it authenticity so if the object is a collectible it's authenticity if the object is an engineering thing then it's specification if the object is a commodity then it's sourcing sure right there whatever it is that you're buying and selling you've got different questions that you want to answer about that thing absolutely yeah but the reality and the auth and

[12:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc&t=727s) the integrity of the description of the goods is at the bottom of all trade right right right integrity that's a great word for it yes the money goes in one direction we've got the payment rails that's all fine that's happening the information about the goods has to be accurate or you're sending the money into space right right so what we're trying to do is build the anchor which was on the other half part of the deal if we're going to send you bitcoin or ether or um you know a stablecoin like the um die or any one of these things right if you've got hard money going in this direction and it's landing on a target where the description of the goods is only 70 accurate huge opportunity for fraud yeah huge if i'm sending squishy dollars which are attached attached to the visa chargeback system if the description of goods is 70 accurate i don't like it and make a charge back if we're operating in a blockchain system internationally there is no chargeback so the description of the goods has to be iron clad yes and the trick here is that we move the insurance function from being associated with the payment rail which is the visa model yep to being associated with the description of goods so we wrap the insurance in case something goes wrong around the goods rather than attaching the insurance to the payment rail right and this gets into a kind of philosophical concept about repudiatability right so if i send you money but i have the

[13:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc&t=817s) ability to pull my money back that's called repudiatable payment sure in that situation you're taking the risk because i send you the money you send me the goods i call back the money now i've got the money on the staff yeah the visa model non-repudiable non-repudiatable payments i send you the money i can't call the money back so now i send you the money you don't send me the stuff now you're left with the money and the staff right and that problem right

[14:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc&t=846s) the entire global economy now right now runs on repudiatable payments right which always leaves the power in the hands of the buyer now remember what i said about the colonial system where it's all trade at gunpoint in a trade at gunpoint system where do you want the power to be in the hands of the buyers because the sellers are the people that we just invaded oh yes of course because they have the different silk or whatever it is yeah see what i'm saying yes right so the very fact that the world runs on non-repudiated unrepudiatable payments is part of the architecture traded colonialism yes right in societies before

[14:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc&t=886s) colonialism was a big thing payments tended to be made in gold and were non-repudiatable so if i walk into the shop and i hand you the gold and you hand me the goods and i walk out again you've got the gold end of story and i can't come and ask you for the gold back unless i've got strong proof right so the very fact that we've got this repudiable payments architecture was about concentrating power in the hands of the colonial authority right the wire transfer system i've sent the money to taiwan but they didn't send me the goods i'm taking my money back screw those guys yes sir that's of course the way we will do it right right you know this is how deeply baked in these assumptions are totally right so when we start tearing that stuff up because the political power situation no longer supports that kind of architecture right you know i'm not going to send you by very nice handmade japanese whatever it is because you're making a credit card payment because you could do a charge back oh of course we won't trade under those circumstances well we will but we'll jack our prices up to compensate yeah and then we'll make sure that we're we're good in this situation and it's all inefficiency yep right so if we start into that kind of system

[15:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc&t=953s) right if we're going to move the insurance right if we go from repudiatable to non-repudiatable payments right you get paid you stay paid we have to move the insurance function from being attached to the payment rail like it is in visa to being attached to the definition of goods right so you make me a promise that you're going to sell me this thing and it's authentic i send you the money but once you've got the money i can't get my money back if the goods aren't authentic i have to be able to make a claim somewhere yeah and i claim your insurance right and that is the architecture for creating a structure in which you could do trade globally but the books will balance for people right now all very high in fluent what does this have to do with william shatner yeah right

[16:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc&t=997s) and the answer is the collectibles market is huge yep it's entirely driven by questions of authenticity people will pay less for things that they want than they would otherwise because they're afraid that the thing that they're buying is not authentic so the prices are artificially depressed for people that are selling real stuff on for people that are selling fakes so the good vendors are being dragged around by the fake vendors right and then that's not good for anyone and if you could drive the fake vendors out of these markets the prices for the goods rise and we'll can be consistent to whatever the value is binco right because we're no longer trading at a discount because we don't trust the goods we're buying so it's an excellent market for really strong product information right and okay we don't expect people to be buying selling goods using nonrepudiable payments on blockchains as the mainstream approach to the collectibles market anytime soon but those same concepts about truth and trust and authenticity apply even in a situation where somebody's making a payment on something like visa right right because in that market there is so much sketchy stuff going on that you can still burn a clean spot to great financial benefit um so that's one side of it the other

[17:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc&t=1069s) side of it is we just weren't going to say no to william shatner right i mean good point good point you know when we when when we were approached by shatner uh and his team you know there were a couple of different things that we could have done first but after we had been approached by you know the shatner operation yeah and you know it started with a direct message from william shatner i'm like well he is talking to me uh it was quite a shock but after that you know it was slightly like direction set yeah because we weren't going to say no yeah and with that as our first project it was obvious the second project was also going to be somewhere in that space so that is one of these path dependency moments where you know if the first thing that happened had been the violin guys had said okay we're doing the violin then we would have been talking about fine art and all the rest of this yes yes yes as it is the first thing that happens is you know the the chat are collectibles and so we're doing that that's what we're going to do yeah right and that's fine because you know if you've got a fundamentally flexible underlying world model it doesn't really matter what you do first because they're all examples of a fundamental principle right right so we've got this fundamental principle which is about your decolonized trade and fair exchange of goods and not writing things through third parties developed countries and an internet of money and all the rest of these concepts but at the end of the day it boils down to i send you money you send me stuff and the stuff is what i paid for absolutely right okay look at collectibles now

[19:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc&t=1157s) the other part about the collectibles market is collectibles generally have lots of different owners over their lifespan right when a stradivarius violin it's not collectible it's antiquity but it's you know 325 350 years old many people have owned it in that time period a lot of them have dotted around the world where they've been owned by people in different countries they haven't stayed inside of a single family or a single region um a lot of the time they're worth more

[19:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc&t=1182s) because of how amazing their previous owners were right because they kept it up they kept the value going et cetera it's not just that because if somebody incredibly famous owned the violin and played it for 25 years oh i see yes yes you're getting their history and their patina with the object absolutely right this is not just an object which was made by stradivarius uh Stradivarius this is also an object which was played by you the manual right right right right yes yes yes yes multiple layers so the thing acquires a value with each layer that's added to it over time you know if i have a star trek collectible okay that's fine i bought it directly from mr shannon right very good then if i happened to be let's say keanu reeves and i bought this thing for one of my friends kids two layers yes so that's the shattered thing that was bought by keanu reeves yes and then he gave it to you know his friend's kid as a birthday present yes yeah and now the friend's kid you know is going to top up their college fund off this thing right right and you know so you wind up with these stories which weave themselves around the objects over time oh it's so interesting yes um and that's a great case for blockchain because this gradual accumulation of knowledge and surface and patina it's the authenticity but it's also the narrative that gets woven around the thing over time makes the thing worth more than it was when we bought it and this is decommodify decommodification right i very strongly

[21:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc&t=1267s) believe that the internet or digital technology in general pushes things to extremes right but it almost pushes things to both extremes total transparency and total anonymity rather than this kind of hazy gray area that you would get with cash transactions right total privacy and total exposure so the commodities are super commodity right you know you go to amazon you type i want to buy printer paper it will show you 38 brands you know the wall be identical you quick one you're done yeah right but at the same time it's also hyper specific because if you're buying something from a dealer you know they'll have a web page where they detail every single little thing about that objective in a way that they wouldn't have done before right so both hypergeneric and hyperspecific so we've seen the hypergeneric the hypergeneric is everywhere now we have to build the hyper specific as the counterbalance to the tendency of things to become generic yes yes that's really the crux of it right we've built out all of the way in one direction in this kind of completely generic economy the unique economy is very very very lagging yeah right because i mean for opportunity though oh it's gigantic yeah i mean and by gigantic i mean like five or ten percent of global gdp gigantic wow right because if you think

[22:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6Emt-XRdc&t=1349s) about this right everybody owns a mix of things which are generic and unique right the richer you are the more unique you tend to own but also the poorer you are right hand made by my grandma who knitted it herself or hand it secondhand yes yes yes yes yes it's unique at one end of the spectrum right and this is a picasso sketch is unique at the other end of the spectrum right it's not rich and poor you know generic and unique it's actually the unique occurs both at the at the rich end and at the poor red right so the entire world of unique goods at the poor end all that stuff is impossible to trade because nobody can identify what it is right if you want to buy you know a pair of wool and mittens and somebody wants to sell you a pair from peru they're not well enough specified for you to be comfortable buying them because you feel like you're kind of taking your chances right if they were well enough specified that you would know that they would fit your hands exactly and they're really made of the wool that they're said to be made of and here's a picture of the granny knitting them and all the rest of it you're probably willing to pay more for a pair of peruvian mittens emitted by somebody's granny than you are for a pair of plastic mittens that came in a box from china yeah and then was just mass-produced and there's boxes for 10 000. because it's kind of cool and the mittens are actually better because wool is better than plastic and you know that somebody made them with craft you can see the little stitches and you're like oh this is nice

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End of [733] Trust models, founding Mattereum, and 'Turning Law into Code' | Vinay Gupta | Conversations Clips. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [773](https://guptaoption.com/texts/773.md) Vinay Gupta — Incentive-based epistemology | Ideamarket... (2021); the most closely related, [556](https://guptaoption.com/texts/556.md) ETHCC24: 'Selling physical things using NFTs: what we... (2024); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.