# Vinay Gupta on Smart Contracts and Mattereum ICO - CRYPTOLISTER.IO > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [737]. 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, 2018-06-30 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VSAC89-9KI. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Mattereum explainer clip. - Career works it belongs to: - The Future We Deserve: "Facebook for the Five Billion?" (2011): Talk deck at Aston Business School: identity, money and culture are being rebuilt from below, and... (suggested by machine) - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (suggested by machine) - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine) - Half a Trillion Dollars a Year of Magic: Blockchain, AI, and the Future of the Built Environment (2026): Mattereum essay: combine AI with the blockchain into self-enforcing smart contracts and move real estate... (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) - 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) - 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: blockchain / global / internet (67%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: smart contracts (3 here; 110 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); contracts (4 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated) - Importance: core-text score 0.18 (1.00 is the top), number 376 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [768] [#03 - Vinay Gupta : History of Money, Foundations of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/768.md): close in content (cosine 0.92) - [783] [Vinay Gupta / DCxPrague (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/783.md): close in content (cosine 0.91) - On the same works, just before: [853] [Professor Michael Mainelli of Z/Yen in Conversation with... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/853.md); [732] [Vinay Gupta - How Blockchain will change our global... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/732.md); [618] [Vinay Gupta - Space - Internet of Agreements (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/618.md) - On the same works, just after: [613] Adam Paigge - Internet of Agreements - Space (2018); [614] Dean Masley & Ahsan Fazal - Internet of Agreements - Space (2018); [615] Anushka Sharma - Internet of Agreements - Space (2018) ## 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 on Smart Contracts and Mattereum ICO - CRYPTOLISTER.IO, video, 2018-06-30, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VSAC89-9KI; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [737], https://guptaoption.com/texts/737.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VSAC89-9KI&t=0s) so now we have this system where we have a kind of global transactional logging thing right everything you know is in this big computer network and everything's linked to everything else and the project that I was part of is called Ethereum and if you're in cable one a few years after Bitcoin and said well that's really fun but what if it was programmable Bitcoin was like a bank account you had coins you could receive payments you could say into payments well that's okay but why can't I write a little computer program that figures out when something should be paid you know suppose I want a direct yeah but I want to bet make a payment once a month well while can I have a program that does that well just run it on your laptop what if my laptop is closed what I want to do is I want to take the logic for that repeated payment and I want to put it in my bank account kind of like you do with a standing order so the idea of writing little computer programs that do things like standing orders and putting them in the bank account kind of lodged with the bank only there's no bank but kind of lodged with the bank gave rise to this idea of Ethereum we're going to make a programmable blockchain so you have this network the the big computer network is called a blockchain you have the big computer network but now you can write water programs at running and for historical reasons these little programs are called smart contracts and smart contracts are not particularly sophisticated yet they're nothing like legal contracts they're really much more like standing orders and programmable payments or programmable money or good ways of talking about them so the kinds of things you can do with smart contracts that you can't normally do or relatively simple things so um for people who are buying and selling across currencies you can do things like have an order that when a particularly becomes cheap you automatically buy some of it but that system isn't run by a broker or a dealer it's kind of inherent to the fabric which is carrying the payments really programmable money um you could take an example for something like take a gambling game right if two people want to play poker on the internet they're either trusting somebody to sit in the middle of their poker game and take the payments from [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VSAC89-9KI&t=150s) both sides and deal the cards but if you're very very very clever you can write a smart contract that basically generates the cards and takes of payments and transfers the money to the winner when the game is over and that sort of stuff sort of has limited utility they don't have that many people that enjoy poker but you know the sort of seed of the idea is there that if you could do it for poker maybe you could do it for auctions and if you do auctions that have this kind of automated logic and instant payment and all the rest of the attributes you get from these things you begin to think like maybe that's a part of the real world and you know if you had a system where you had the ability to do an auction but it didn't go through something like eBay you know eBay charges quite a lot of money for hosting auctions it's something like 10% of all the money that goes through bait stays with eBay and that's why you pay is an enormous company well the buyers and the sellers are paying through eBay to exist in the same way the buyers and the sellers are paying for uber to exist in the same ways that the buyers and the sellers are paying for Airbnb to exist so quite a lot of people who are involved in this whole space blockchains and cryptocurrencies and all of these things are looking at those enormous companies as potential and inefficiencies in capitalism that could be pulled out and replaced you know if you have something that works like eBay but it's 10% cheaper you will tend to shop there if you something looks like Airbnb and it's 10% cheaper you'll tend to shop there and these things because they're living in this global computer network rather than inside of a specific cluster of servers somewhere these things have a certain magical property which is that they're global by default they're everywhere from the day that you launch them and the services are universally available and this is quite interesting because you think about the edge of the network you know we're not really very good at going beyond say the two billion richest people on earth wouldn't we begin to talk about the internet and the services that it provides but if you're in a position where you know some bunch of kids build a hotel rental website for California but it's actually all the blockchain and its global by default it's just born global and then you discover that you know folks in South Africa are using it to you know rent housing to each other and then the next thing you know it's Molly and then you realize that it's being used in villages all over the world for some completely unintended purpose the that kind of [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VSAC89-9KI&t=300s) output an outcome is much more likely with blockchain than it is with the conventional sort of website model the fact that these networks are inherently global the fact that all the logic is kind of buried in the payments architecture the fact that there is no real recognition or international borders in these systems because they all operate embedded in the Internet they've they don't see the world as a set of countries they do see as an enormous global network all of those things point to the possibility currently very far off with a point to the possibility that you'll begin to see global service architectures that run on these systems not just the payments which we already have and they're being used very successfully in a lot of poorer countries but also the possibility that the services which are built on top of those payments will turn out also to be global by default and that that will turn into a very substantial development bonus very early days right we're at the point where we've just about got the thing off the runway we've given it a few kind of scoots around but in terms of the size of these systems you know 200 billion sounds like a lot of money but the total value of all the things in the world of prices is said to be 700 trillion dollars so we're in a position where we're only at the very very very beginning of this kind of digitization of money this is only the start --- End of [737] Vinay Gupta on Smart Contracts and Mattereum ICO - CRYPTOLISTER.IO. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [613] Adam Paigge - Internet of Agreements - Space (2018) (no text here); the most closely related, [768](https://guptaoption.com/texts/768.md) #03 - Vinay Gupta : History of Money, Foundations of... (2021); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.