# Vinay Gupta - Mattereum (part 2 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [735], part 2 of 3. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2022-04-01 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Contracting and insurance layer.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things.
  - Taking a crack at a practical system (introducing the ESCROWNYM) (2012): Blog essay proposing the escrownym: an identity lodged with escrow brokers under a legally binding... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (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:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy.
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products.
  - 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)
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (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)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Smart contracts, law & arbitration (28%); Crypto compliance & money laundering (16%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: NFT (15 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); Ricardian contract (6 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); real estate (25 here; 106 sources in all, earliest dated 2013, 2 undated); Mattereum (30 here; 127 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); risk pools (3 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2016, 2 undated); DigiGold (2 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2021); wealth inequality (2 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); vaccines (3 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); contracts (15 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); scams (2 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2016)
- Importance: core-text score 0.46 (1.00 is the top), number 122 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [793] [COP26 Event: The Circular Economy - Finance and Data for... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/793.md): same career work: The Future of Stuff
  - [239] [The Future of Stuff (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/239.md): same career work: The Future of Stuff
- On the same works, just before: [778] [Vinay Gupta on the Future of the Metaverse (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/778.md); [678] [WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with Vinay Gupta (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/678.md); [790] ['Mattereum is Blockchain Cypherpunk' (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/790.md)
- On the same works, just after: [800] [Lecture by Vinay Gupta at the opening event of Data in... (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/800.md); [594] [Mattereum Physical Asset NFT Online Meet-Up 27 July 2022 (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/594.md); [574] [Wealth Inequality (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/574.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: Vinay Gupta - Mattereum, video, 2022-04-01, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [735], https://guptaoption.com/texts/735.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 3
[43:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=2589s) albanian ponzi schemes in the 90s you wound up with something like a third of the gdp of albania tied up in a set of ponzi schemes right and eventually those ponzi schemes collapsed and it took out the albanian government and there were any number of acts of total mayhem as a result because people that had previously been one day quite rich were suddenly absolutely dead broke and the entire mental model that we were operating inside of dissolved out from underneath them right this can happen to us if we do not get our together on these fundamental issues of integrity when it comes to handling other people's money what um what do you think that we can do kind of to um steer away from this idea of like the wild west because i know for a lot of people that's a positive thing and that's like maybe the whole reason that they're here is to get away from um yeah right so if we're in a position where you have just vicious amounts of scamming and theft in the crypto ecosystem and by the way this also applies to losing huge amounts of other people's money because you've got bugs and smart contracts that wind up with like 150 million dollars locked somewhere right if we don't start taking care of other people's money eventually the feds are going to come and shut the whole thing down right you cannot run a thing which is a financial system that has like 30 losses you know from things like bitcoin getting lost in wallets and then makes up those losses by having a whole bunch of new people come in with new money to reinflate the bubble on the other side of that right like you just there's just no way yes it's not sustainable you know it requires constant you know almost geometric growth um i mean and that that behavior is ponzi-like right yeah it's the albanian ponzi schemes everybody was really rich until one day they weren't right so you know i'll ask you what is the best best best bull signal that i've ever seen for bitcoin yeah what is it right nigerians buying physical products from china from bitcoin because they don't have access to doors and foreign exchange accounts

[45:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=2739s) right that growth signal american hedge funds buying bitcoin that is not a fundamentally bullish signal because at the end of the day hedge funds are speculators they've speculated on bitcoin they think it might go up they think it might go down they don't care they're not using it for anything they're buying it to sell it later right the nigerians allowing it to do something good i think that that that certainly one of the biggest reasons for uh a lot of the like hype around um cardano is there like uh organization with the ethiopian government [Music] so even though even though you know the technology is still ephemeral uh i would say you know a good half of that market cap is like speculation on there actually being a real world payment system going into place right this is only going to hold together right if we basically change culturally to the point where crypto is more secure than regular banking rather than vastly less secure and this comes down to scam control and you say oh but how can you have scam control on a decentralized network well there are ways of doing it right you know i can i can take you through a set of the mechanisms for doing that and in a sense what Mattereum does is we do scan control for people that are going to do physical things we've got a set of protocols a set of legal and technical and smart contract machinery that gives us the ability to do fairly serious scan control for people that are buying and selling physical things using nfts right you buy the gold bar from Mattereum well you buy a gold bar the Mattereum is then the warranties for and the gold bar will actually be there you see what i'm saying yeah yeah yeah you know because otherwise what we're going to get is another bubble where you've got a whole bunch of people who are selling nfts for like here's a rolls-royce enjoy our new lambo token you can go and pick up the lambo from singapore tomorrow morning you turn up in singapore there's no lambo right so you know the goal of Mattereum is to make sure that we open the gateway between the crypto world and the physical world what we don't get is a massive rush of fraud across that gateway right what we want is a portal between the physical world and the digital world which literally just burns fraud to death if it tries to pass in either direction and at that point we could

[48:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=2889s) begin to build a really clean interface where the technology does what it was always supposed to rather than being this enormous freaking circus of apes yeah i i think i think what happened and maybe i'm biased because you know i think as the i'm an optimist and a lot of problems will tend to sort themselves out um so i think they will eventually get sorted out what when was that ever true if you look outside of the world around you you look at the news what problems

[48:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=2925s) have sorted themselves out in the last 50 years well i mean education for one um you know the number of people being educated improving and you know i don't want to you know repeat what have we what have we just seen in the pandemic right totally unfounded rumors about how the disease is transmitted and about what the vaccines do resulting in something like fifty percent of the u.s population refusing vaccines maybe no i didn't say it's a sole problem i said it's a problem that's being solved it's clearly not being solved these people are vastly more ignorant than they were 30 years ago when they took their vaccines in with one of them i disagree i mean if you if you look at the larger picture you know the entire global number of people that can read and write has increased even by shortages right they're reading and writing but what they're reading and writing is toxic garbage which drives them into war or other kinds of insanity like we're not dealing with a situation where the population are making better decisions they're making worse ones

[49:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=2992s) right climate change in case you want to notice half of the world is on fire and it's 120 degrees in places like vancouver that's not getting solved we have sat on our hands where we run directly into the wall right we are seriously in trouble in this planet and everybody's wandering around as if this isn't true but let me tell you that you know it's very very apparent we have serious issues here that is something i can you know like understand um but i look my my kind of reasoning comes into you know if it becomes a big enough problem there will be enough incentive to solve that problem historically this is never true right i mean stalinism was a big problem but you know stalin died in his own bed after he killed something like 80 million people right we've had starvation as a constant problem in this world for most of the 20th century we still haven't fixed that right it's a while since we've had a really bad famine but there's no fundamental mechanism in place to stop those famines we're still losing about three million people a year to hunger homelessness right epidemic homelessness damn near everywhere we know what the solutions are we will implement you know like if we continue to paint this picture that the world is better than it is in rosier than it is what it stops us doing is taking effective action to correct the problems before they mushroom you know if the ethereum foundation had taken the first ico scams and publicly shamed these people as monsters there is a pretty good chance that we would never have seen the ico bubble and we would never have seen hundreds of millions of dollars being appropriated by people that took the money and delivered nothing and you know think of concurrence that that would have made to adoption and public trust in the blockchain and it was a critical moment where they could have taken a political stance and they didn't and as a result we just opened the door to the scam artists and they came in and stripped the ecosystem of enormous amounts of its capital but also enormous amounts of the public trust in the ecosystem like this stuff is super critical we can't just paint over these cracks and expect to change the world so in the sort of to tie that together a little bit here um

[52:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=3142s) if you're planning on you know through Mattereum here you're unlocking all this on all this potential power what's stopping that from being like uh you know what like to grits point there he's like you know uh knowledge and information has never been more free than it is right now but you're saying that that's hasn't led to better outcomes in terms of education so why how is more giving people more power over their assets going to play out any differently so truth is a very very powerful thing right what Mattereum is at its root is a set of economic mechanisms for ensuring that people are telling the truth and for covering the damage which is caused if people um believe themselves to be telling the truth that they make a mistake or somebody comes into the system and successfully executes a fraud so the thing that cryptography gives you if you use it correctly is it gives you an absolute certainty about who said what when it doesn't tell you whether what they're saying is true or not but it gives you absolute certainty about who said what when it makes people accountable because they can't weasel out of their promises they promised they would the deliverer will note that they have not delivered if you carefully take that and use that as the basis for legal evidence you could create a system where you could make something which is higher standards of evidence than you would get for for example for current real estate transactions so you could take a system which builds on top of the existing real estate system and make something which then adds the crypto to it so it's even more fraud resistant you take the existing gold infrastructure you add crypto to it it becomes even more fraud resistant than the existing gold infrastructure what i'm attempting to build is a subset of commerce where things are automatically true you will never get ripped off in this domain because there are so many ways of safeguards and insurances and warranties and you know third-party verifications and so on but you're perfectly comfortable buying a five-story apartment building on the other side of the world without ever seeing it because if it came through that protocol correctly it is going to be there or you're going to get two million dollars in cash as a payment from somebody that made a mistake and they accidentally verified the wrong thing right this is how you get into a friction free

[54:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=3292s) trade environment you get a friction free trade environment because everything is true you can really trust the descriptions if things are on us and at that point you just execute your strategy without worrying that you're going to run into constant fraud in the process of doing your business and that right creating an honest place where trade can occur inside of a very very dirty filthy scam-driven corrupt world that's how we begin to actually generate real economic values in the blockchain right not zero-sum scam games not people paying two million dollars for jpeg which will be worth precisely nothing middle of next year but you know you actually start saying like hey you know rather than taking six weeks to buy a house four months to buy a house you did it in an afternoon and it's 100 percent yours as soon as the transaction goes through and all think about all of the time in stress and hassle from the people buying houses from the people buying cars from the people buying our from the people buying you know vacations expensive handbags wherever it is the entire process that we go through of having to do the work of figuring out whether something is a scam ourselves you change the economic incentives inside of a very specific set of markets but get into an environment where there is just no fraud and that that's a great use face for crypto that genuinely improves the world it will be dramatically profitable and it will not create a kind of you know horrific fraud-driven ridden wild west land which is what we've currently created right we're here to make the world a better place but are we here to rob our neighbors who are a little slower moving than we

[56:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=3396s) are what is the fundamental brand of crypto is it honest business or is it unaccountable fraud in terms of like uh developing and you know standardizing a a set of contracts or templates that people can use to make this work like besides hiring an army of lawyers how do you how do you get over that that hill like is that more or less your plan to to kind of do the the grunt work as you get started that's why it's taken us you know four years and several million dollars to get this thing up and running right because if you don't do the grunt work the comp the thing doesn't hold up under legal scrutiny it means that you think you own the physical asset and somebody goes to court you turn out not to right our job is to make sure that when you buy the nft in the event of a legal challenge the court will agree that because you bought the nft you are entitled to the physical property that's the whole thing what's um what's stopping a competitor from getting to market sooner who's hasn't done the same due diligence that you have well we're already on the market so step one be first and we are right um but you know step two if somebody sets up a kind of you know crappy version of what we've done and then attempts to sell stuff through it um all we can do is say look this is our protocol and this is why it's safe if you see other people with protocols which don't work this way or they haven't done the paperwork properly you know you're taking your chances and that really is an education problem we can't go out there and physically stop people selling things as nfts right we don't have the ability to do that all we can say is we do it properly does somebody else do it properly or not i don't know that's for somebody else to judge or maybe we get into a position where we actually review these things and tell people what we think of them that sounds like a litigation rabbit hole and i'm not in a hurry to start doing that but you know you might get into a position where that was a valuable commercial strategy so one one thing um i've kind of noticed with you know real world asset platforms on crypto is you know how do you avoid centralization when you're using third parties to verify you know these real world assets to put them on chain when you say centralization what do you mean so when all information is just going through one party for instance so with

[59:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=3546s) digi gold um you know it had to go through you know the digital platform essentially to verify the actual gold bars i mean are you guys building something like that where you're working with specific third parties or you know are you doing it in a different kind of manner well so what i can want to come back to here is centralization right so the nature of a physical bar of gold is it can reside in precisely one volt right is that centralized sure right so there's no way to decentralize the voltage of a physical asset if the vault is robbed the stuff is gone end of story however what you can do is you can have multiple sources of insurance on the asset so that if the asset is stolen you're not reliant on a single insurer to cover the laws but if you do that you're going to wind up overpaying for the insurance because you're paying several different people to cover the loss the price of getting this kind of stuff decentralized is that is expensive because you've gotten multiple people who are covering the risk okay interesting so in terms of Mattereum you know how are you going about that kind of problem you know are you working with multiple insurers or you know verifiers or you know how is that operating so let's talk about this from a conceptual level yeah um if you're buying a physical thing how do you know that the physical thing is physically there and how do you know what the physical thing is like i would usually inspect it if i'm buying something um you know in person it's there in front of me i can't i'd have to do some extra checks you know at a certain time if i'm buying let's say you know a gucci jacket and i don't know if it's real or fake but if i'm buying online and i i'm and i'm buying a physical asset such as let's say another gucci jacket i probably buy from a verified source have you heard the story about the uh prada store in beijing uh no i haven't there's a legend that's giving a prada store in beijing which is that they had two stock rooms and two checkouts and two supply chains for bags because the factories that were making the bags were running a second shift and so the store was under performing it might have been gucci it was one of those big brands i can't remember which one we'll call it prada for now yeah

[1:01:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=3696s) but um they had a second supply chain so you could buy a bag out of that store it was made in the same factory as the prada bag it was made by the same person yeah one of them was the genuine prada bag and the prophet went to prada and one of them was the knockoff and the the money went straight into the pocket of that shadow supply chain okay right now that raises some very interesting questions about well at that point is it really a fake or is it just another real bag but let's say for the moment that we agree it's fake um there is no reasonable way that anybody walking into the protest or buying a bag would think that they were going to get a fake bag from the prada store um yeah who do you trust i mean how would you even verify that later down the line which one it came from absolutely right so this is an irreconcilable aspect of the physical world it's very very very hard to know when something is genuine and you know prone to handbags if you've got a fake fried handbag you've lost the money that you paid for the real prada and if you buy a fake jet turbine blade you have a much worse problem with your hand right and i'm not planning on staying in luxury goods for very long right jet turbine blades medical equipment right there's an enormous market for things like x-ray machines in secondary markets and think of the benefit to the world's hospitals if you've got an excellent way of verifying the quality of the secondhand x-ray machine and if your x-ray machine breaks you can immediately buy another one as an nft and it will turn up on your doorstep 36 hours later somebody will install it and it will work guaranteed so you mentioned secondary secondary markets so where in the supply chain do you see Mattereum you know essentially cornering the market where do you see the biggest kind of impact you know is it at the manufacturing stage or is it the retail stage or is it you know selling on once you already have it um so in different asset classes Mattereum will do different jobs in different ways so if you think about um the gold bullion markets you have this thing called the good delivery system and the good delivery system is an ultra trustworthy backbone for moving 400 ounce gold bars around the world

[1:04:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=3846s) it's a really really tight system because it's seen off every kind of fraud imaginable and it's been running for a good long time so you know if if push means shove you're probably much much safer with good delivery bars than you are almost any other kind of asset but even in that instance the us government seized everybody's gold assets in the in the financial collapse of 29 i think it was 31 that they seized the gold and gold people in america remember that very very bitterly you know that's a part of the kind of cultural institution of gold in america as the federal government stole it all one time so in that market adding nfts to the good delivery market probably doesn't do very much in terms of increasing the security of the good delivery bars except that you may be able to get particular kinds of risks which are not covered by the standard insurance policies covered um on the other hand how much nicer is it if you want a payment for something like a house to get a payment in the form of good delivery bar gold nfts relative to something like say bitcoin which could suddenly go up or down in value very quickly yeah so i think there's an enormous play to be made in beginning to set up payment instruments which are seriously decoupled from the volatility of currencies including the volatility of the dollar the euro the yen and all the rest of them and that's not just gold and if you are for example selling a house maybe you just want to swap the house with somebody that wants to live where you live and then they stop the house for somebody that wants to live where they live and they stop the house for somebody else and four or five trades down the line somebody swaps the house for the house that you want and the whole thing happens without anybody having to go out to fear in the whole process and like a three-person trade in the nfl it could be a three-person trade could be a 40-person trade because you have the technology to do that they do you know board games they have things called math trades for board games yeah very long part of groups so barter loops that's a game changer in a lot of industries cars can you imagine what happens to use car markets when you begin to do bartering for cars yeah so huge amounts of this kind of stuff are possible um cars are another enormous market like buying used cars can you believe anything that they tell you when you buy a used car usually no almost almost nothing you have to go by how it sounds and how it looks yeah

[1:06:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=3996s) and if you you know if you're not particularly mechanical you're really really in trouble when you try and buy a used car that's crazy the world is filled with great mechanics why can i not get the great mechanics to look at the used cars and tell me what they're actually like but the problem with that vinay would be because my family they own a garage and you know like they buy and sell cars as well the issue may be is that there are only certain things that you'd have to like know intimately so there's different expertise and there's going to be difference of opinions so it goes back to the third party question you know how would you recon um you know reconcile that aspect of you know what is the actual truth in that regard you know in terms of what it's actually worth yeah like it's it's great that you tell me that you're like your organization that values used cars is the best at it but like how do i know oh you just designed the incentives properly so if i sell you used car and i say i will maintain this car for you if it develops any kind of problems you bring it back here we'll fix it and if your car is not drivable for some reason that turns out to be a mechanical problem we will provide you with another car of equivalent or higher value for the time period this car is off the road i don't have to care as long as you follow through on that promise i don't mind so we attach a clause to there which says right well this is the promise and if the promise isn't met and we're going to make a thousand dollars a day out of this escrow account to cover your car rental and inconvenience at that point i could buy the car as an nft i don't care um and do you do you see as do you see Mattereum as you know actively acting as a sort of you know trust layer in that regard then so what we want to design is a situation where buying the nft gets you the result that you want or a better result in all possible contingencies and that's fundamentally right when push meets chef and everything goes into the detail what that comes down to is money if you do not get the thing that you're paying for you get more money than the thing that you were paying for had cost you and as long as that is always true you create a situation which fraud is inefficient because fraud costs you more than doing honest business

[1:09:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=4146s) have have you spoken to or are you working with any existing insurance companies or do you plan to go sort of a different route with that um so we've had a conversation with a lot of different people over the years and the group that we are working with uh right here right now um are the lovely folks over at unn.finance right blockchain folks they do risk management they've got a very sophisticated system for doing risk management they fit right inside of the d5 ecosystem and they've got a really really clean way of handling risk um which lets people buy into risk pools and if they feel like staking those risk pools they can and the whole thing is really just very elegant very clever i like it a lot interesting yeah i'm definitely going to check these guys out because they're very they're great i mean like um what they're doing is so exactly what we needed it was just like have a 10 millimeter wrench would you like another ah this is exactly what we wanted it's just it's it's one of the it's one of the things like i mean you know there's a lot of slogging material right the thing that we are doing is hard and you have to think very carefully and you have to spend a lot of time talking to lawyers and you know the lawyers they come in they come in waves it's never just one more you have a week where it's like oh my god i've talked to five legal firms this week so you know when you get something that just kind of falls from the skies like these people really have their thing together and it works and it's just like it's there enormous relief it's fantastic so you know that is the beginning of a wide range of different ways of taking the risk out of things and if you want to really understand what we're doing um think of something like a prism right where you shine in white light and it splits it up in lots of different colors and then you put it back through another prism and it recombines it back into the original white light so what we're doing is we're basically peeling apart all the different kinds of risks associated with the kind of physical ownership of a thing and then we're recombining the thing into a financial instrument which includes ownership of the thing plus specific coverage for all the other risks that could befall the thing so that the package financial instrument is the thing minus all of the risk and you will pay more for that possibly quite a bit more if the risk is extreme but what you get in return is total convenience and total peace of mind because what we're establishing is a paradigm for trade in which you actually get what you pay for or something better

[1:11:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=4296s) with meaningful guarantees behind it that's a good way of uh that's a great way of positioning it sort of um automatically like it's like the the risk is priced in front from the get-go kind of thing that's that's exactly the point of the entire enterprise and what we're using the blockchain for is efficient packaging of all the different rights that you have to combine to get these kind of risk-free objects and then you only need a an army of lawyers instead of a whole planet for them legal work is reusable every used car in the jurisdiction is kind of the same every gold bar it's kind of the same there's an enormous amount of worldwide and i only have one real last question aside from how you guys integrate with your union my main kind of question is like how do you guys handle like metadata so for instance let's say um i mean i i know a gold bar is pretty much going to be the same over this period lifetime but how would you handle theoretically because i don't know if you do this already or not but let's say like a property and it like you know gets like flood damage or like you know its actual physical attributes change yeah so um this is kind of the metadata question right how do we represent what makes an asset value and the answer is very very carefully yeah i mean gold bars don't change weight right the bar is as the bar is it's much easier to handle gold than is to handle real estate because there are like 200 million things that can go wrong with real estate right but somebody is willing to buy risk on every single one of those things that can go wrong for price and at that point you as a real estate buyer decide how much you want to pay to have your risk taken away and other people look at the situation and decide whether they're willing to buy the risk on that basis right so we are building this out a little piece at a time but in the long run what we're talking about is risk-free commerce you know what the price you're paying is you know that you are in the clear at that price if you want to play a lower price and eat some of the risk yourself you're perfectly free to do that but we give you the option of going all the way to risk-free if you want to and you know you see how that changes

[1:14:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=4446s) the way the world works in some really critical ways do you think there could be uh like a scenario where um there's like a contract marketplace essentially where people could pay a premium for a Mattereum official contract or they can risk it by going with the one that's like available uh yeah um i didn't quite understand that one more time there was a there was a detail there that i missed yeah sorry so like um do you think they will eventually like have for the same asset class or even asset multiple contract options where like one contract is like maybe the Mattereum official contract where you guys have kind of dotted all your eyes and crossed your t's but somebody's more than welcome to sort of go with a community created contract that might not be might not have that official stamp but you know it's going to save them on on fees so rather than thinking that this is contrast are we talking about basically warranties like group one will warranty at this price group two will warranty at that price something like that he's saying basically rule Mattereum contracts you know be the premium like luxury item essentially or will it be like contracts that don't have Mattereum based protocols and will they be worth less essentially well i mean so i'm not quite sure what we mean by contract in this case like we're talking about you want to buy something and then you know there's a thing you want to do on the back of that something like that i think so right patrick yeah so like um just for example so you're saying the the sort of the the back end required to sell a bar of gold is very simple and the back end to sell a house is very complicated you've got the bar of gold thing figured out there's very little metadata there's very little sort of relying on outside um organizations uh it's very kind of clean in that sense the more complicated it gets the more work you guys have to do to sort of um ensure that everything is as it says it is yeah is there a market for the middle there for like for other organizations or other actors who are not you know Mattereum employees so to speak to create

[1:16:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=4596s) um these sorts of infrastructure themselves yeah yeah so i mean the way that i would see it is this you know 20 years down the line i would expect there to be hundreds of specialized insurers or insurance syndicates or risk pools or mutuals or all these kind of risk management structures i would expect there to be hundreds of these things um and they would there would be a competitive market for basically having these entities provide you cover in the same way that there's a competitive market for say renters insurance right yep i want to buy a car there are 12 people that will issue me a warranty on the car i pick the warranty that i like best and i buy two of them because just in case the first one is bozos i've got backup on there right and you know the first one gives me a lower price because i'm buying two of them you know from two different brands and they've got some kind of arrangement okay great the thing with all of this is you know there's an enormous amount of capital in the world that is looking for something to do that generates a return right so if we take our used car example let's say that the good mechanic misses a severe problem with the used car at one time in 300. you know they might miss little stuff you know they'll take the car off the road for a day but like really catastrophic engine failure the car is junk let's say they miss it one time in 300. so if i'm paying 10 grand for a car i pay an extra 300 for the one time in 300 he misses that problem and now the book's balance the risk is compensated if my car turns out to be trash because the mechanic missed something he's taken an extra 300 bucks for all the cars that have gone through in the last 10 years there's a reserve there and it pays for my new car now he's not going to do that for 300 bucks he's going to do that for 500 bucks and keep the keep the difference and as a result i pay a thousand five hundred bucks for a car but now i'm totally covered in the event that the car turns out to be trash how happy am i willing to pay five percent more for used car if the used car is guaranteed to actually work and actually does that's easy that's an easy decision for most people yeah and in most situations if you have a real expert look at something the real expert will be able to detect problems

[1:19:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=4746s) really pretty efficiently so the real experts are going to print money because they're going to look at these things very quickly they're going to pick out the problems very effectively they're going to refuse to take anything on which is a bad risk and at that point you buy something that's been through the hands of a real expert you get what you paid for and the real expert makes money on the difference between their judgment and the judgment of the people that are offering the warranty right so if the expert comes in and is basically very very very efficient they can get a very very cheap warranty rate whereas if somebody that is less skilled is going to get much more expensive warranty rate so what it will do is it will drive purchasing decisions into the hands of people that are genuinely expert what they're buying and selling and it provides a business model for those people to drive the clowns out of the markets which saves everybody huge amounts of time and money i mean can you imagine how different the last 60 years in america would have been if used cars were accurately described and you've got exactly what you paid for think of that think of the total ruin which is crappy used cars being bought when they've been you know overly inflated and people have done chop shop work on them and they've repainted them and all kinds of that stuff and all of that could have gone away if only there had been some reasonable way to get expert mechanics to look at the vehicles to get paid for giving an opinion and to make sure the opinion is on us because they're financially on the hook if it isn't if we'd had that financial architecture even if we'd run that financial architecture on paper we could have driven the fraud out of the used car market and used cars could be absolutely sane and reliable in the same way that say used houses are generally speaking pretty soon and reliable right we've put up with titanic levels of fraud and for essentially because we just didn't build the architecture to get rid of it i think it's completely doable and the ethereum smart contract you know kind of protocols provide you with all the kind of atomic building block legos you need to build that system and that's what we've done we're still in the very earliest days of the rollout and we're two months into providing services here but you can see the direction of travel is a world without fraud um just sort of expanding on that a little bit and maybe a little bit of an offshoot but uh with regards to uh

[1:21:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=4896s) sort of creating this ecosystem and an offshoot of that is creating this like marketplace of experts do you sort of see any other maybe positive um you know sort of new markets that could develop because of this technology oh i think they're i think they're very hard i mean you know what's some that stick out to you so right now i mean you know this is news to a lot of people but the world is kind of dying right now right like we've poisoned everything in the world with a variety of horrific things you know like micro plastics everywhere weird looking poisonous compounds for plastic softeners everywhere like you can't even find penguins that are free of these chemicals and you know human fertility like sperm cancer down something like 50 in the last 50 years yeah something like that yeah you know like we are really seriously living wrong and this is before we get to climate change which is catastrophic and apocalyptic so you know i'm not a person that ignores those kind of problems um i used to work in disaster management and my business card said i don't get out of bed for less than one percent mortality there was some model who said you know i don't get out of bread for less than 10 grand it was you know that was kind of a joke at the time i don't get out of bed for less than one percent mortality but it was true so you know the i'm not i'm not ignoring any of these macro structural problems right the fact that you know everything is made of poison and the world is run by mafias like i'm not intending to take that lag down right it's just not what i am so the biggest con and i wrote a book about this by the way the book is called the future of stuff you could buy it on amazon um so um it's a it's a short run book it's like 15 000 20 50 000 words so the biggest con is that the stuff that you're buying is benign right you buy a car hey i got a perfectly royal used car it does 20 miles to the gallon and i drive it 60 miles a day because you know i've got to go to work and that's half an hour and i got to come back and that's half an hour and the result of me and everybody like me having a car like this is that our kids are going to grow up farming with picks and shovels on baked hard soil because civilization has collapsed

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/735-3.md (part 3 of 3).
End of [735] Vinay Gupta - Mattereum, part 2 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.