# Vinay Gupta - Mattereum (part 3 of 3) > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [735], part 3 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/.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 3 of 3 [1:24:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=5046s) and you know you kind of think that's a joke but like all of the coastal cities gets trashed we lose huge amounts of agricultural productivity because the weather goes crazy and the plants just don't like crazy weather um you know and you wind up with things like entire countries with failed electrical grids because there's so much demand for electricity in unseasonably warm summers and unseasonably cold winters but the grids cave in and it destroys their industrial productivity you know the world at its efficient best is staggeringly productive but when you start throwing total chaos into the weather and it wrecks agriculture and it wrecks electrical grids and has all kinds of other unexpected effects like entire countries burned to the ground um you very rapidly go from having an efficient global ecosystem to having a fragmented unproductive mess and we are plowing right into those challenges right now i mean you know this thing where it was 122 122 fahrenheit in canada like 50 celsius like that's not okay that's unseasonably hot for mexico in the summer never mind canada right um so what we have to do is we have to apply this no fraud perspective and we have to start looking at the physical objects around us and say is this thing poisoning the world by existing and if so why would you expect me to buy it so do you expect that sort of putting all this out in the open will make it easier for people to sort of choose things that are less harmful or um what i expect to be perfectly honest is that we will start creating the capability for individually tagging things to figure out whether they're good or evil and then that will provide a basis for governments like the norwegians and the danish to simply ban the stuff which is the germans right uh yeah you know like this thing doesn't have the correct paperwork you can't import it to germany because we're afraid it's evil right contains toxic chemicals way too much co2 is produced in the process of manufacturing and we think there's a decent chance it was made by slave labor you can't import it no right and you know that sounds like oh my god this is some crazy utopian dream where we're actually finally going to fix capitalism and it's not going to produce all this toxic garbage but you know it's only a crazy utopian dream if you intend to have children that live a normal human lifespan [1:26:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=5196s) right i don't know whether you guys have looked at the ipcc reports but we are utterly utterly what sorry the ipcc the international panel cloud change the enormous national body right that just reads the report that said we're heading for 1.5 degrees of warming no problem no doubt we cannot get less than 1.5 degrees we're probably headed for 2 degrees or 2.1 degrees 2.1 degrees of warming is something like 10 times the number of outrageously freaky destructive weather events like it is living on a planet gone mad compared to the standards of the past thousand years it's like i have a friend who is super against buying anything from nestle he hates the company they're he thinks they're just the worst thing in the world spends an inordinate amount of his time and energy just trying to avoid their products so like i'm i'm worried that like having more options and more everything won't i'm worried that it's not going to make enough of a difference i guess in that sense i'm not suggesting this is voluntary compliance right i mean he gets an option where he just clicks on his credit card never show me anything bought by nestle and then all that stuff gets stripped out because it's in the metadata right that's how Mattereum that makes a lot of sense when you put it that way it makes it easier for people who want to make those decisions to make them but if we wind up in a position where we have to do mandatory carbon taxation the goods have got all this carbon tax all the carbon footprint stuff i mean look i'm already selling gold bars that have their carbon footprint calculated and we've bought the necessary carbon offsets to cover the carbon that was emitted in the process of melting the ores and so on to make the gold bar we're doing this right now so if we did that for everything it might not stop all of climate change but it would put maybe a trillion or two drill trillion dollars a year into regenerative agriculture into reforestation um into things like possibly project vesta where they're going to bring grind up rocks and put them into the sea's way of pulling co2 out of the sea i mean there are a lot of things you can do when you start taking real revenue streams and diverting them and for most people by the way offsetting your annual carbon footprint is sort of on the order of like 200 a year [1:29:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=5346s) which for you know for most people that are concerned about it is negligible and we still don't do large-scale offsetting because the offset markets were wrapped nobody trusts if you put your 200 into those markets anybody's actually going to take the carbon out of the atmosphere for you and as a result everybody just doesn't buy carbon offsets because we assume there's going to be fraud down the stream so cleaning up the offset markets is a critical part of getting people to actually offset their freaking carbon emissions i mean and you know if i sound kind of uh passionate about this 20 years ago i figured out that we were completely right 2002 i started a project to handle hundreds of millions of climate refugees and i expected it to take about 30 years for those refugees to arrive and i expected it would take about 30 years for me to get that from first prototype through to a massive deployable capacity to build you know shelter for hundreds of millions of people right and i've spent 20 years chipping away at that problem across a whole range of different domains with the shelter we have infrastructure modeling language we've got plans for the governance we've got identity systems you know you name it we've been chipping away at that problem for literally two decades um you know i used to work for the red cross i didn't work for the un i spent an enormous amount of time in military academia so for me this isn't like hey climate change is going to be a problem like i recognized how bad it was going to get 20 years ago i recognized that we were not going to do anything in time because that's just not how human beings work and that it was going to be an enormous screaming scrambling mad panic as soon as things got bad enough that we saw that there is like a real issue now and here we are 20 years into that 30-year program we're just at the point where like the next generation of people the next wave of people are beginning to get the fear right um and you know the fear is like we could see four celsius of warming that's say 10 fahrenheit warming and 10 fahrenheit warming it's not well behaved warming where it's like everything is 10 fahrenheit warming no it's like 25 fahrenheit of warming sometimes and then other parts of the year the weather is relatively normal but those those freak events are enough to destroy your crops and make your cities unlivable and collapse your electrical grids right um the earth can sustainably soak [1:31:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=5496s) up about two tons of carbon per person per year and we're currently outputting five tonnes of carbon per person per year people who are in the global top percent are spitting out 70 tons of carbon per person per year so we need to get down not only to zero carbon per person per year we need to get the negative carbon because we've already dumped so much carbon into the atmosphere that the planet is warming and it's going to take so long for that carbon to get metabolized out we're still going to wind up with like civilization traction levels of warming the thing we're attempting to build here right is we're attempting to build a framework for getting to the truth about physical reality right who made this how much carbon did they make when they made it does it contain any of the following chemicals was it manufactured by slaves and if we can get to the truth about what's happening in physical reality in an accurate way that provides a leverage for everybody that wants the world to be a different place right because you don't want to live in a world where if you have children you don't trust your children will be able to eat because the climate is trashed right you want to live in a world where if you have children you expect them to have a better life than yours it's a whole idea and we violated that idea because we've dumped so much garbage into the ecosystem in the last 100 years we've trashed everything so to get us back into a trajectory where our children will expect to have better lives than we had what we have to do is we have to get to the truth about how much carbon we're emitting why are we emitting so much carbon how much of this toxic stuff is in this you know like i've just bought this you know coat how much of this toxic plastic stuff is in this coat wow that's way more than i was expecting but you don't want that knowledge to come after you buy the thing you want that knowledge to come before you buy it so first line of defense is individual consumer behavior second line of defense is legislation where if you've got accurate data about objects governments can simply ban the imports of things which are too toxic and we can begin to forcibly clean up the global manufacturing system before the global manufacturing system breaks up futures so you know like we're starting with the gold and we'll do the 35 000 handbags and we'll do the classic cars and the magic the gathering cards and all the rest of that stuff to build the skill to build the experience to build the volume to get the systems working but then the objective is to do every manufactured thing in the world [1:34:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=5646s) so that we can provide the data necessary for people to be able to steer us away from the abyss that we're currently headed straight into and i mean to square the circle i suppose it's um you know the increasing of information that's going to be widely accessible it's going to allow people i suppose to make informed decisions forever and and people's software agents so you know if i have some kind of machine learning system and it's got access to all my purchase data and i say look next year i won't have a third less carbon emissions that i had this year and i also want to take the following six evil chemicals out of my diet right it could find me the least painful way of making those lifestyle changes you will spend 7 500 re-insulating your house and you will need to spend four thousand dollars trading in your crappy old car for a new electric car which is much lighter and much cheaper to run this thing will pay off economically in six years but it will immediately meet your climate goals and your health goals because you know those machine learning systems they can't help us optimize our footprints until they've got data if we can't get the data about the physical world for the machine learning systems to run over we are not going to be able to close the loop on this we need something for the machine learning systems to run and you know the only technology that stands a chance of doing this is blockchain you need a scaled blockchain unlike anything that we've ever conceived of but we've got a few years for that scaling to happen you need something which can handle about 20 times as much data as visa handles today but we've got the computer architecture that could theoretically do that we're rapidly developing the software infrastructure to do it like this is an achievable goal right it's not an achievable goal in two years it's an achievable goal in somewhere between 10 and 20 years but we could start with the heaviest stuff first housing cars and the rest of this kind of stuff which is where the majority of the money but also the majority of the carbon are and if we could get the things which have the most money and the most carbon straightened out on this policy of truth basis then very very rapidly that provides the system where individuals can express their preferences and that can begin to cut our impact in one way and then governments can come in on the back of that if they want to basically force choice where they have to i mean you know next to this plan bitcoin looks like a pop gun right this is by far the most ambitious thing that anybody's ever conceived of doing with the blockchain and let me tell you this is the future of the blockchain because if we don't do something like this [1:36:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirlEzDxjpI&t=5796s) you know there isn't really another technology that has the ability to get the global economy under control in this way you can't do it with sql databases there's just no freaking way so you know this is the next step in a 20-year project to try and make sure that we don't completely destroy our world and it has a side effect of running the entire global economy of the blockchain that's a great i think that might be a good uh good point to end on absolutely but you know this this is what gets me out of bed in the morning is like you know i get up and i build a system to save the gold dot world because if we don't have a lot of people working on this stuff what's going to happen is we're just going to laxatively slide into chaos which makes mad max look like a brochure for holiday you know and people are like you're joking Vinay you don't seriously mean that and i'm like you know have you seen what happened when the sahara desert ate entire countries in africa right do you remember the dust bowl from america's history where entire states just basically the soil just blew away and nothing grew imagine that but everywhere right that's the kind of chaos that we're heading into and if we don't do something about a pretty sharpish we just have to make it the center of our lives until we're out of danger it's way more serious than a war is um so anyway that we need to get our together and this is the agenda well yeah that's uh that's very well put to kind of wrap things up there um yeah it's been a it's been a real pleasure speaking with you today --- End of [735] Vinay Gupta - Mattereum, part 3 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [800](https://guptaoption.com/texts/800.md) Lecture by Vinay Gupta at the opening event of Data in... (2022); the most closely related, [793](https://guptaoption.com/texts/793.md) COP26 Event: The Circular Economy - Finance and Data for... (2021); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.