# #3 Vinay Gupta, Indexing the physical world (part 2 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [758], 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, 2019-10-08 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc. 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): Access-not-ownership economy that suits resource-light settlements.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Cypherpunks (1992): Cypherpunk practice in the 1990s: cryptography as a political technology.
  - William Shatner collectibles with Mattereum (2019): Mattereum partnership with William Shatner giving memorabilia legally backed digital twins against fraud,...
  - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (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)
  - 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.
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - 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)
  - 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: Information markets — universal registers and digital twins (59%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: digital twin (10 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); interoperability (8 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); Shatner (9 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); William Shatner (7 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2019, 1 undated); NFT (6 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); second-hand (3 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); collectibles (4 here; 27 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); commodities (5 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); ICO (4 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); IPFS (2 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2014)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): NFT; foreign direct investment
- Importance: core-text score 0.39 (1.00 is the top), number 170 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [565] [Coin Telegraph AMA with Mattereum's Vinay Gupta 14th... (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/565.md): same career work: William Shatner collectibles with Mattereum
  - [684] [DEVCON1: Dangerous Old Men: Cypherpunk's Failure,... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/684.md): same career work: Cypherpunks
- On the same works, just before: [752] [Vinay Gupta: The Cities That Will Walk Away (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/752.md); [165] [The Mattereum Manifesto: green capitalism, product... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/165.md); [254] [Vinay Talk Amsterdam October 2019 (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/254.md)
- On the same works, just after: [252] [Vinay Gupta / Mattereum Manifesto keynote at the London... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/252.md); [253] [Goldsmiths talk on life extension and fluid language (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/253.md); [777] [CCForum London 2019/Vinay Gupta. Blockhain and the... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/777.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: #3 Vinay Gupta, Indexing the physical world, video, 2019-10-08, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [758], https://guptaoption.com/texts/758.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 3
[37:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=2250s) refrigerator on a tip jar and when you get low on coke whoever is in front of the machine just calls the number on the front of the fridge and says we need more coke the guy comes puts the coke in the Machine and then takes the money on the tip jar and to make that work in the real world you know you have a 5,000 pound vending machine which is an enormous armored Walker and a whole bunch of services that deal with that problem right you know so we need to think in those kind of terms what we want is the fridge with the coca-cola what we're going to get is the armored machine unless we can layer in a layer of trust or trustless infrastructure that allows those kinds of dispensary systems to exist I I agree I guess I think that's a lot of a lot of what you know the hope that exists in this in the space of blockchains is aimed towards this idea of you know allowing human beings to come to decisions together in a trustless manner it's really it's really a fascinating picture you provide that it's almost as if the the potential benefits to indexing the physical space to allow them to interoperate with each other will have this bonus effect of allowing us to draw down upon what we own and not require so much in terms of in terms of our consumption and the world the world is filled with people that want your stuff right I mean it's filled with people that want your stuff you know imagine we take you know the contents of you know half the garages in London right meticulously index all of that by hand as an experiment translate all the listings into let's say Hindi and then list it all on the Indian eBay and let's just assume that there are zero transaction costs and all the stuff gets moved by magic when the time comes how much of it is going to go all of that now it might not go for what you want it to go for but it will won't go so consumer demand globally is so large that if we could figure out who wants the stuff we could get rid of all of it right and this is gonna result in all kinds of weird anomalies and pricing bubbles and and you know fashion trends and all kinds of crazy things will come out of that but the end of the day I think the Run was nothing that a

[40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=2400s) westerner is hanging on to there is not of value in utility just somebody else somewhere in the world if they weren't rid of it and if it's costing you money to own it and it's costing you headspace to figure out where you're gonna move it and it's taking up space it could be used for somewhere else if it's got opportunity costs you would rather be rid of it to somebody either who is here or anywhere in the world then hang on to it so I kind of feel that what we've got here is an enormous glut of manufactured goods which is basically clog it up our society like arterial plaque right and that's because you're literally Amazon we'll bring it to you an hour but nobody will come and take it away we've just hugely optimized the production system and the delivery systems and the sales systems all that targeted advertising stuff we've optimized everything Canada left-hand of the sale and then everything to the right-hand of the sale everything post sale is just a disorganized analog swamp how could we possibly expect to run a world that way I've desert you're gonna see one point you know like it feels you know sometimes when I make this argument I kind of feel like I sound like a crazy person it's like no you must understand the moon is actually a cube and it has only four sides but one of them is invisible you know but but it's just it's a shift of perspective to think thing about like look we've spent two centuries optimizing manufacturing we've optimized the hell our sales in the past 20 years all of us internet advertising stuff what happens after say also remember landing on that well we didn't leave a bit of a step we didn't air BnB it's a bit of a step we did Alma's we did am uber it's better step these things are all attempting to bring some digital order and restore it'll work you know after sale post sale digitization being at your point but like you know when you actually think about if we were in manufacturing and our tens of thousands of times more efficient in the last two hundred years right how much more efficient is advertising off we digitized that like if we really are in a global environmental crisis and we don't want to kill capitalism because it is after all the only thing that knows how to make things like antibiotics and vaccines um you have to start thinking about how you domesticate capitalism in that house to mean that we take the same kind of efficiency breakthrough that we did for production we did for investment and we point consumption and waste but I don't understand why the argument wasn't made 30 years ago because after it's

[42:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=2550s) made it's a of course that's how we're gonna do this with any of these changes of methodologies when you build something like this it's very important to get people to actually use it and to incentivize them to use it and I'm thinking about the the use case of an end user or the experience of an end user what's going to make it better for them to use this system the idea of a pop up on your phone coming up saying you've got this bicycle you haven't used over two years someone down the road wants to buy it from you and they're willing to pay this much do you want to sell it and I guess that's where it becomes easier because you don't even have to think about settling it you just get the offers is is that the vision of the eye I think you you you totally start there right and I think you could go further right I think in some of these instances if the objects are highly liquid right so if it's something where if you want one somebody will bring it to your house in two hours pretty much guaranteed if you were in a big city it could just sell it automatically you know hey where's the VCR oh we sold it right hey we want to watch your video on Saturday okay we'll buy another because if the sale price is really close you know if the second-hand price is really close to the purchase price who cares right and if we've got super accurate tracking of information about what the objects are you know if you think of something like a high-end digital camera a good professional DSLR those things were made so you can drop them in mud and as long as there isn't a lens attached to it the camera body will be fine right so you know there are tons of businesses right now the ramp camera that's the problem is it cost about a third of what the camera would cost to buy for every week that you own the damn thing this is crazy and it's happening because we don't have liquidity right nobody carries a DSLR around with them all the time most of them are sitting there on a shelf because once or twice a month you take a bunch of pictures and that's for people to consider themselves to be ometer photographers right the people that are just like hey we want to take a nice picture of our kid the camera gets used intensive ly for two years and then they go back to taking pictures on their iPhone like normal people right that enormous glut of camera hardware sitting around unused that must be like 5% or 10% of the net worth of shortage right the number of you know ahead poor hipsters who are just dirt broke but they've got you know

[45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=2700s) two-and-a-half grand a camera they take that camera is not being used most of the time it's not being used so if you had a service which would bring you a camera like you could order pizza and they'd come in they pick you up and take you somewhere else again almost all of those people would be better served by that deal that by having the camera that's all there all the time as long as it's cheap and there's no reason for it not to eat you because there's so much liquidity in those markets if you're the fleet of cameras armed also individual said intend they own them so much you could have very very very very strong liquidity in those objects and you could have a rental model but I think it's probably better to have a model when should you buy and resell it than a model and put you rent it because it's just legal easier it's more capital intensive for the people who are buying the goods but it's really less capital intensive for the people that are selling them and there's no need for how once you have a blockchain there's no need for a central hub that acts as the renting agency what you need is for everybody's cameras to indicate when they're not being used to the owner the owner allows them to be listed or they oughta list at a pool and then somebody just basically turns up on your doors having picks up that camera right and you know that approach where the goods are almost like they're almost mobile by default you don't really even think about them as owning them more is just you know having access to them temporarily yeah and and if it's a rental model the goods belong to somebody else and you use them and you pay for using them versus if it's an old model you buy it when you need it you keep it as long as you need and then you sell it to somebody else when you don't and the difference is which side did the deal needs of the capital so in the rental model via somebody has to take a risk of buying a ton of cameras and then renting them to people and that involves you in a whole bunch of risk and then you need higher profit margins to compensate for the risk what if you didn't buy enough cameras what if you bought too many it's a problem whereas in the other model you know if you are looking for a camera and there isn't one available and you need one right now maybe you buy a new one and then it goes into the second-hand market at 95% of the value that you bought it for so you wind up with Fleet property but without the idea that somebody manages or rooms of the fleet and you wind up with third-party services where people come in and verify that the cameras are still intact you know there's there's lots of machinery you would need to make it work this way but what I see coming out of that is vastly more of the world gets access to a high-end camera when they really need one the camera manufacturers sell way more cameras and new because right now what stops people buying new cameras is

[47:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=2850s) the fear they won't be able to get good value when they sell them but if I buy an don't use it that much I'm gonna spend three and a half grand or a camera I might never use you know is it that much better than my existing gear well I don't really know right so all of those kinds of questions go away if you've got really robust secondary markets which I think will sell way more cameras if that sells more new cameras doesn't that drive up consumption um per service unit delivered right so if we think of all the people that want cameras but don't have access to them that's unmet need right if the only way of meeting that unmet need is to buy a camera and they'll leave it at home where you're not doing anything with it then we have a problem which is you've got a whole bunch of you little want cameras and Callaham you've got a whole bunch of people that have cameras and don't use them what we need to do is optimize quality of you know what we're really measuring is quality of life per unit of environmental impact so everybody wants a camera or access to a camera half of people 1/3 of people but that's global no you know if we turn up in America and someplace with a strong fashion culture Kenya right Kenya has crazy fashion stuff going on South Africa has crazy fashion stuff turn and only you know if you're trying to put one of these places and you've got a wagonload of digital cameras the locals will use them if they're available it's just they don't have access to the equipment or nearly the same cultural basis that we do here because we've got a ton of money and they don't so that even the people who think that are poor in Western societies still have a ton of money compared to the people that are poor in an African society its orders of magnitude so if we go down this kind of model what happens told the mid-range cameras that people aren't using well if there's a casual rental market for high-end gear most of the mid-range cameras will either be personal property of people that take photographs all the time but they probably rather have a high-end one or they'll get pushed to the edges of capitalism for the people who are too poor to afford to rent high-end gear and so you'll wind up with a kind of tear in Mexico Africa India China rental markets for medium range gear New York rental markets for 60 megapixel camera so that also by the way come with whitening rigs right and you've just wind up with the consumer goods you know the consumer goods glut or the consumer goods bubble that we have in the West just gradually diffuses out over the rest of the world meeting consumer needs that are

[50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=3000s) currently unmet and what that would allow us to do is potentially meet a ton of the middle-class aspirations of people in the developing world without having to go and man a factor of five times as much stuff as we've already done and if we think about the transition into this where things are holding their value better if you've still got the old system which things aren't holding their value so well and you want to buy a digital camera then you've got the new system or the old system but it's still cheaper on the old system how do you make that switch to the new system if they're still you know cheaper alternative because people would often take the cheaper one when they I think that every rule takes the cheaper alternative if it's there but you know in America and I think this is probably true in other places but I knew it to be true in America lots and lots and lots of young people aren't buying cars they're just spending the money that they would have spent buying a car or an uber right because it's actually way more convenient to spend $200 a month or uber than to spend $200 a month on a car payment yeah right and you know the car depreciates in value so rapidly you know almost nobody feels like they get good money for a car unless they buy like you know a 1987 Datsun at 50,000 miles and then put another 50,000 miles on it right almost nobody feels like they could deal with a car even something like a Tesla you know it's like wow I get to live in the future that's amazing how much time I paying for this compared ruber you know because it's hard unless you're a daily commuter or you're driving backwards and forwards to work unless you're a daily commuter in most cities it's really hard to use a car enough to justify it particularly when you've got Oberon you've got Car Rental no scooter rental scooter and oh my god those things I'm so expecting somebody and just start mopping those things up off the streets pulling them to pieces and then building solar arrays of all the batteries that's the important part I can't think of what you do with the more by doing selfie we do the batteries um so I mean the the place where we're kind of spearheading this model is collectibles because collectibles by definition not only hold their value but their value increases over time right and that's nice because that's you know it's like trying to build aircraft in an environment where things fall up you know being able to take this kind of model and digitize the ownership of like depreciating assets like cameras and cars that's pretty tricky because the thing really is worth less for every

[52:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=3150s) person that owns it and the more it's used in your constant compensating for the depreciation - problem using this kind of model for things which appreciate value over time the wine is more valuable every year that it's all drunk it's good at the beginning you know the the you know Star Trek memorabilia is worth more because you know more people are interested in less of its being made or ever happens to be you know fine are you know all this kind of stuff the things which hold their value really well and would you accumulate value over time Rolexes thus of super easy you build the digital twin it's super detailed it's very trustworthy you take it to third-party Assessors they frame as an insurance contract you know you can buy second-hand Rolex with or without the third-party assessment I'd buy it with then I'm gonna raise the price of it to the point where you start really wondering whether you've done the right thing and maybe you're gonna buy the one without the assessment you still buy the one with it and we figured out how much the markets willing to play for the information guarantees about the objects authenticity so by starting in markets where the things are worth more next year than they are this year yeah I don't want to say we can't fail but we kind of have a much easier time of it then trying to build those kind of efficiency mechanisms in areas where the goods are depreciating in value so give us a bit of a picture in how the relationship with William Shatner appeared and a very rare Star Trek figurine that you've you've been seen with at various conferences so we we started material with the ambition of starting a Supreme Court of the internet right Bitcoin is the central bank of the internet you know Ethereum is kind of the bureaucracy of the internet and Ethereum Mattereum was going to be like another Supreme Court and we always knew we were gonna focus on material dispute and delamination or all the rest of this stuff but we always thought of it as being a largely judicial process but year ago we retooled because we realize that we're just too early and there is enough large-scale dispute in the blockchain world for us to be a viable as a court right we need a trillion dollars a year of transactions using blockchain to talk to physical stuff to be able to support a billion dollar company that has current services for the exceptions get right we're in the wrong business so then we realize that most of the dispute so you get our disputes over authenticity of things and we start talking about hey you know what might a legal authentication layer which is like digital identity for physical stuff and we start talking about well on Twitter and then one day I get a tweet in my

[55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=3300s) direct messages and it's like hi I'm William Shatner and you know I kind of get this thing at it's like what and then it's like you know like I'm interested in this thing that you were doing you know I might have used this for that Rathlin kind of paraphrasing I should go back and see exactly what the original tweet was but you know there was this moment of like and then the world changed color more so it turned into a long series of conversations and and then we were introduced to Paul Camus so who is a longtime collaborator M and Paul basically figured out what the commercial strategy will be for this project the ad they're gonna do with William Shatner and so we're basically a vendor to this start up in America called third millennia polka Musa was running the shop and William Shatner is providing the authentication service he's what you're turning up and saying yeah that's real that's real that's real that's real that's true that's real and that's what we're doing and you know he has a lot of ambition right I mean mr. Shatner is remarkably clued in on technology I think because he said perfect access to the top end of the tech business literally for 50 years you know nobody turned his own phone call from William Shatner and so he's just spent an enormous amount of time getting briefed on how things work and as a result he's super super sharp on tech I remember one time he grilled me on you know like details of a key management in different cryptosystems like so how does this system monitor excuse me I can't use this and then you know so whoa Wow duped and you know that's a really nice starting point right um you know Star Trek is perennial over at this point it's one of the oldest institutions that still functions in Western society all the discovery was a little bit rickety and you know what we're hoping for us to use that as a kind of beachhead into the future right you know it would Shatner authenticates things you're not gonna get stronger Brown than William Shatner's head so when it comes to Star Trek stuff right other people might offend to get other things through their machinery through their network through their understanding of how things work in Hollywood we provide a technological base layer that supports that this establishes the paradigm for building digital trends and physical things and

[57:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=3450s) then adding value to those digital twins by having people that have detailed knowledge sign off on the fad that is so and parody matically once that's available in the collectibles market why would you take a collectible that didn't have that kind of authenticity attached and that then establishes a new standard for the secondary markets the goods which are tagged in that way rise in price the goods which are not tagged in that way either remain static or fall in price the collectibles market increases because people wouldn't take the risk because they didn't feel they had the knowledge will now take the risk because the knowledge is provided for them by third parties technically what is a digital twin is this something that moves on a blockchain or what sort of shape does that take so digital twin is Aza abstractor terms webpage it originally comes out in NASA so NASA when they build a space probe would build a physical twin of the space probe so if something went wrong they could try and replicate the symptoms on the physical plane that they had and if you were lucky you didn't need to stick it in a vacuum chamber to see the error right now this components burned out that's where the thing is a wiggling properly are they know now we know what to do so then for a lot of things they'd rather have a digital model than a physical model because it's just cheaper and easier and if it's not super high-value thing maybe the digital train is all you need so it then crapped out of engineering and into other fields and every other field when they acquire the terminology uses inter mean what they mean rather than what NASA meant so there's a big kind of blurry blob of various things which get described as digital twins but basically you know a human being builds a a digital reference of the aspects of the thing that they're interested in so um one person might build a digital twin of a thing which focus the bike on its characteristics from an electrical engineering perspective another person might build a digital turn of a thing which focused on the return on investment depending on what you were expected to see in terms of some right you know if you're an electrical engineer your digital twin is the solar panel you know takes this much voltage and does this to the grid and all the rest of that stuff if you're a financier your digital twin it's like show me how much money comes out with this thing if the interest rate is X and the cost of capital is y you know that kind of thing so when we use the term digital twin generally speaking we're talking about building a model of the collectible that answers the needs of a collector so it's a good digital model

[1:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=3600s) of the object it doesn't need to be 3d for most of these things might for some of them ideally it'd be 3d um secondarily they need a good model with what the object is in terms understanding its authentication status so you don't just need a picture of a signature you just proof that the signature is actually authentic and a few other bits and pieces like this so if you think the digital train is being like it fits your hand right depending on what angle you're grabbing it from you'll wind up with a slightly different kind of digital twin and our idea is that you basically just have an array of all the different digital representations of the object and what's the different people make a claim about the authenticity of the thing and that's how you frame it does that make sense you know it's good for think of like I think a fit and color on a piece of clothing right an ideal digital train for a piece of clothing would be a perfect 3d model of the shape of the cool thing you'd be able to check it against the 3d model of your body and you'd be able to match it color wise against everything that you own right but in practice almost nobody building digital models really understands how to check color properly you know they might eyeball it that it looks right on their monitor but very few people were capable of building a digital model of a physical thing which is correctly managing all the lighting and all the rest of that to give you a good match to color so what you're gonna do is you'll have a digital turn of the shape and then somebody who's got power calibrated equipment for measuring color we'll take some pictures of it and then Cour calibrate the pictures right you kind of see how that would work like everybody that looks at it from a different angle will produce all your different SATA data and then you as a consumer of that digital data like if you need to know whether you know this jacket goes with that skirt you're interested in the color if you want to know whether it will fit across your shoulders you're interested in the shape and the ideal Platonic digital twin is all things to all people simultaneously and it's a single file and it contains everything but in fact we don't have that yet you know so shape color provenance digital signatures authenticity statements and all the rest of those things they're all kind of fit together so the digital twin is a little Frankenstein Ian in practice and overtime and I think time here might be as much as 50 years we'll probably wind up with a universal specification language for physical matter and won't that be fun well it sounds like it's building blocks to get to a point in time where humans can continue to behave you know in a way that makes us feel

[1:02:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=3750s) like were still consuming but allowing us to do it in such a way whereby we're not destroying the planet and and we're going to need to index things in particular ways in order to allow us to achieve that we go skiing right I have do take your own skis Roger in skis a arrival point now I actually yes use I have my own Israel so there are lots various like skis canoes this kind of stuff where it makes a ton of sense to leave the equipment out the place where the fun is right so if you go skiing in a bunch of different places and it's always a pain in the butt and getting hold of the skis that you want because there may not be exactly what everybody else wants you wind up hurting your own skis and it's a massive pain right oh the look on your face right now I I am a fairly large individual which means I need a very specific kind of Bend big skis big skis very often they don't have them and moving their skis around there becomes a necessity and moving the skis around is not easy yeah easyJet's man a ton of cash off the fact that I'm having to hateful to take my skis around ski threat so for somebody that doesn't need such specific skis because they're not seventh root for in those situations if the ski skate stays at the place where you do the skiing everybody's life is easier and everybody use this ski over and over and over again right so amount in a situation where you could verify that they have exactly the ski you want lock it in as soon as you do clear tickets right and if they don't have the ski they want either they get it delivered to them or you get it delivered to you in time for you to go skiing imagine the system run perfectly reliably right to the point where if there was a breakdown somebody would FedEx the skis there and they still get there before you go off the plane we could build those kind of systems right and at that point why would anybody own analog skis in west they lived in rural Canada under ultra for mountains everyday practically everything is more valuable if the goods stay in the place where the activity is performed so if we took every tan every canoe every pair of skis every snowboard every mountain bike and every other thing like that and we took him out of London Reutimann big warehouses in the far side of the m25 and they were delivered to your house in two hours if you want with them orb aerosol delivered to the trailhead or the lake how much better is life right and you know that's

[1:05:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=3900s) probably I don't know 500 tons of highly specified manufactured goods that would go from having a duty cycle of like three hours a month to having a duty cycle three hours a day I just I just can't imagine the you know the future world doesn't work this way right I mean and and it feels like it's kind of like in any society which isn't basically just Mad Max full collapse we're just gonna continue to warn new experiences and interesting things and we have to figure out a way of maintaining the cultural churn which is so interesting and so creative without also resulting in enormous quantities of landfill when we've just said the pirate hats are no longer fashionable again if you see what I say just you know there's a kind of forehead swapping quality to this and we've tried this before right we tried the sharing economy and we tried and you know Internet of Things and we've taken a few bites at this charity from different angles never crack there and I think we never cracked it because we just weren't ambitious enough we just didn't think big enough you know we had to go weird to go much further together so is blockchain the correct technology to do this with um so yes right I mean weirdly enough this is probably exactly the right thing for blockchain so the if you think a Bitcoin as an enormous pile of Madra Nouri gold and we've got a software system for managing that pile of imaginary gold we bring you imaginary gold into existence we could transfer the amount of gold around the world there is a thing which is akin to a physical material which is called Bitcoin it's like a simulator of the way that a valuable metal would behave if you then go to something like a 10 FT model we know of a simulator of how a hammer behaves right and you could build these simple simulators for how different kinds of materials behave in really simple ways right I mean Bitcoin if you implemented Bitcoin in like a visual basic and an Excel spreadsheet it's probably 50 lines of code right the part where it becomes a blockchain problem is interoperability between many different computer systems so Nora we're talking about the vending machine right if we had a perfectly fair egalitarian society run by Buddha's then you could single giant data warehouse which was you know like the human stuff database

[1:07:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=4050s) and it would be like Wikipedia there'd be a single entity we own everything and everything you know if you would go no problem you know kind of like full-bore cybernetic socialism we don't live in that world right we live in a world where privacy is super important and we never really managed to get computers to talk to each other so you know if we think of the ski example right you know if you're a ski join in you know at our divorce right and you know you want to coordinate with an airline to make sure that when that passenger arrives the skis are waiting for them at the hotel right the cost of getting those computer systems to talk to each other is probably like 20 percent if you're on your we'll take or something right because it's a couple of Engineers for a couple of weeks to read the specs to figure out how the airline system works to integrate everything they're in upgrades your systems your system brakes we just don't know how to get software to work together in super complex networks right the places where we have managed we've bashed all of the semantics out of the situation so internet documents of literally just paper simulators right you could run pretty much the entire internet more or less by just shipping around JPEGs we've the web has like no semantics right all that you know is that it sends you a bunch of bits and it shows a picture or a piece of paper on your monitor the fact that it's being passed as a rendering you know a language which goes into a rendering engine and then it's about a spot on your screen you don't know you don't care all that you know is you see an image right that's not at all what needs to happen when you do do low level digital synchronization of processes like you would need between Airlines and ski lodges and taxis and all the rest of that stuff so because we never go over the hump on these kind of synchronization technologies using a fully kind of point-to-point approach none of the world's computers talk to each other right except for pushing really stupid documents around you know which have no semantics and no intelligence inside of them think of how different it would be if you had one copy of your name and address on the internet and everybody could pull that automatically when you give them authority right we've been running the web for 30 years at this point and we're still manually entering our data on forums or we have that information stored in our web browsers and our web browser enters that data on a forum for us who is going on right if

[1:10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=4200s) I change my address every detail or the I talk to has to be given my address again because we never figured out the interoperability and all the data sourcing stuff we just never figured out so blockchain comes along and blockchain is like I got an idea rather than trying to network together 50 million computers all of which have different agencies and different ideas about how the world works well if we just build one big shared computer and everybody connects to that computer okay that's great and what if we make sure that that single computer isn't owned by somebody that will then become your king how do we do that well it's kind of a democratic share of computer and everybody who wants to run a slice of account or and you can you know mumble your way forward but what we're doing is were basically avoiding the horrific Allah complex path of trying to network together computers all which are owned by different people and do things in their own way and instead we make a single big imaginary computer which behaves like our master computer does but is in fact non-existent as a master system right so this kind of is such a weird way of framing this I fed him mostly I probably frame this differently but what we're essentially doing is we're essentially simulating a gigantic robot overlord which does not actually exist right so we load everything into the blockchain inside of the blockchain space it is as if there was a robot overlord but in the real world there is no robot overlords that are just a bunch of dudes mining Bitcoin or mining ethereal or stakin or whatever it happens to be so it's it's about solving the interoperability problem by not solving interoperability just making one big machine which is virtual and you know that is a it's a terrible way of solving the problem but we tried the other way of solving the problem for decades right I mean XML yeah EDI XML EDI WSGI um there must have been 50 attempts use xml standards of adjacent standards to figure out some way of doing automated interoperability for stuff you know there was so there was XML RPC you know there just just an absolute alphabet soup of attempts to solve the interoperability problem it's just too hard so instead we simulate a single computer and we all connect to that single computer we simulate all the stuff that we want to do in that machine err we call that ethereal or that kind of reference so the blockchain is the only thing that we've got that allows

[1:12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=4350s) from massive interoperability of different computer systems diverse different computer systems so if we're gonna build this system without first installing you know robot overlord utopia if we're gonna basically build this stuff on top of existing society there is no other digital platform rather the blockchain that can solve the interoperability problem then we have the problem the blockchain is just stupidly so an incredibly expensive but you know we've got billions of dollars working on that problem right now they're either gonna crack it or I'm gonna laugh at them for centuries so we have to hope that they crack it because I don't want to sit around that long do other people's freaking computer science this is this is kind of a running joke right I said that if they didn't get to scaling so it was scaling sorted out in five years I was going to go back and hire all my old professors from red rubber a university either were the great gurus of parallel computing and I was gonna get them to design a block shape right and we're headed for that five year let me know guys so come on get it moving yeah there's certainly a lot of experiments happening in that area and certainly the ambition to make it happen is there yeah here I mean I've heard very good things about Al Gore and from a computer science perspective I believe this stood up and networking nobody's using it well I think that this is this is where we are currently there's a there's a huge amount of experimentation there's a lot that's being thrown at the wall and seeing what sticks and the she is use you know we look at you know the amount of applications that are being used currently on Ethereum and you know the user numbers are very very small if anything you know some of the most interesting metrics are actually coming out of the NFT space with people you know buying and selling items and the games rap tackle it makes sense to people right so we're we have this new AI idea of a technology given to us by Satoshi and we are finding all the different possible permutations of how these things can look without really giving much consideration yet to who you know who's going to use it and how and why and and also also ignoring the power of network effects and and you giving certain projects hundreds of millions in valuation no no because they've come up with a new way of slicing slicing the pie but

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/758-3.md (part 3 of 3).
End of [758] #3 Vinay Gupta, Indexing the physical world, part 2 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.