# #3 Vinay Gupta, Indexing the physical world (part 1 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [758], part 1 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 1 of 3
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=0s) welcome to episode three of the non fun gerbils podcast today we're delighted to bring to you our conversation with Vinay Gupta Vinay has a varied background as a futurologist advising on disaster planning and state failure solutions he designed the open-source disaster relief shelter the heck's yet he was one of the first generations cypherpunks release coordinator for the launch of Ethereum and now he brings all of that together in material to index the world reduced global waste and increase efficiency we have a very wide-ranging discussion covering the state of a theory in five years in how software can further improve our lives what changes digital models of everything can bring William Shatner how non fungible tokens vital for modeling unique things in the physical world as well as looking at our current state of affairs in society stick around at the end we go through some of the funniest gerbil entries for I see a gerbil and announce the winner plus give the name of the next episodes non fun gerbil if you're new to this we along with the community create fun characters based on themes and ideas within crypto mixed with gerbils we give you the name you send us hilarious backstories on Twitter and then we create an illustration based on the most entertaining story and mint a set of tokens that we send to everyone who participated in that round it's a lot of fun and it's our way of playing with the tech and building a community now on with the episode we hope you enjoy it [Music] vinegar - thank you so much for joining us on the podcast I'm currently in a place that's very dear to my heart which is this wonderful place up in North London which I used to spend a lot of time at because I used to spend a lot of time in your company talking about Ethereum back in the early days so Ethereum was effectively where we first met and part of the the rollout of that project so it would probably be a good idea to talk about life before a Ethereum to begin with and and and your background leading up to that point and then from there we'll take a sort of an approach of what a Ethereum is currently doing and where we are cool yeah it's good to see you again George yeah the first couple of years after Ethereum launch we did basically a dinner party

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=150s) every two weeks here and that was part of a project to try and build language right so I was pretty sure that when you have something genuinely new happen you don't have the words to explain things and the way that you find those words is you get a lot of people who are very diverse talking to each other for a long time and what comes out of that as language information and I spent years basically figuring out how to explain the Ethereum to people and a huge amount of that came from just all the time that we spent harshing at issues at dinner parties and then eventually if you're like right now we really understand this issue now I could explain it and because you can't form language except by talking to people and if we can't form new language to describe new things we wind up with your constant permanent misunderstanding so that they'll hook in a language formation thing these days whenever I'm explaining Ethereum I explain it in terms of the speed of light communication one that you know very explicitly we need to synchronize all the world's computers if we're going to be able to trade goods globally we can't synchronize all the world's computers because there's about a third of a second delay to send a signal all the way around the world and back over the regular internet and even if you use um you know custom cables and satellite links and you bounce signals off the ionosphere however it happens you're doing to get maximum speed you're still gonna have about a seventh of a second and a moderate hft system will do roughly ten million transactions a second so you know a seventh of a second delay is like 1.3 million transactions I was saying so we've got this fundamental problem that we cannot synchronize global civilization using computers because of the speed of light limit and that's the new she theory and lives in right your any global synchronization protocol for the world's computer is going to involve a delay 200 transactions is a clear and that makes the blockchain or something much like the blockchain physically inevitable and that's my argument and you know I would not be describing the need for the blockchain in those terms if we hadn't spent so much time talking about it I'm just peeling back the layers and peeling back the layers and peeling back the layers until we could identify what's truly essential yeah that's that's that's fascinating I remember I remember a lot of those conversations we used to turn up to the I think of the Tuttle club back in the early days just to just just to talk about those those kinds of things absolutely so a lot of what informs your opinion on blockchains

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=300s) was was built in the 1990s in those early was of eagled those kind of applications tell us a bit about that trajectory through to to being part of the Ethereum release so i was a kind of first-generation cypherpunk correct i wasn't very active because i was kind of young and specialized in other areas so in the very early nineties i was a graphics programmer i worked on medical visualization systems worked on flight simulators kind of was part of the team that invented the world's fastest volume rendering algorithm at the time now it should do like decent datasets at 10 frames a second on a PC with no graphics hardware on 1993 PC right serious algorithmic chops and then I went on to invent incredibly fast fog algorithm when I was working for a company in Florida so so yeah I was a graphics innovator but I knew the herbicide thought that the exhilaration of graphics hardware was eventually going to make people like me redundant this turns out to be completely the opposite of what happened because it turns out that when you make graphics hardware better all that happens is that the artists start throwing you vastly more terrain right so I can't even sumed like oh well you know my niche is gonna get automated no no no what happened was that my profession got superpowers and this I think is the thing that will come to again and again and again that everybody is afraid of automation but in almost all cases what you actually get as professionals with superpowers rather than people being automated at so any one way or another I figured that what I ought to do is get out of the graphics monkey game and go off for more how databases work because that was how we were going to handle terabytes size terrain went onto the web and in parallel with all of this there's the kind of early bang produced by PGP right and everybody's kind of looking at PGP like well that's gonna change everything but nobody could figure out how because it turns out the secure email doesn't actually solve the problem that you think it solves right so there was this whole kind of like massive nerdy jimping out like wow this is gonna change everything and there was lots of very long id very futuristic stuff about you know why we're gonna do all this amazing stuff it's gonna change the way that we relate to the state you know eventually there will be things like currencies that run over these technologies and if there was all that enthusiasm and then what came out of that was ecommerce and

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=450s) it turned out that the real impact of all that early cyberpunk stuff was HTTP link encryption but to give us a credit card processing which gave us the internet that we have now but it wasn't clear to everybody that it was gonna go that way because what people thought they were going to get was an end-to-end encrypted anonymous Internet that made the internet like a separate geographic territory right this is John Perry Barlow and the Declaration of Independence of cyberspace and all the rest of that stuff people thought that cryptography was going to create a protected domain in which the state didn't reach which would be a domain of the mind it would be a domain of free speech it would be a domain of ideas and it would be a domain that was completely separate from physical reality because of cryptographic anonymity and that was the part of the 90s Internet vision that would totally buried under e-commerce so you know that was you know my internet experience was kind of waiting for this cryptographic wonder one paradise to come into existence and then it becomes clear that we're watching down the Commerce tract and everybody's like oh whoa that I didn't see that coming and then 9/11 happens and at that point it's time for me to get a crypto so I decide that I'm gonna go make myself useful get into energy policy like we're obviously fighting over oil do we really need the oil and then from there into disaster relief and you know 14 years go by before I really go back to crypto in a serious way about once two shortest in the Pentagon it was weird time though was it was it a Ethereum or Bitcoin that drew you attention so I was aware of Bitcoin really early 2012 maybe something like that and then you know I sort of looked at Bitcoin was like this is not actually gonna change the world right because what I knew from my time around crypto currency type stuff in the late 90s was that if all you had was a payment rail all that you got was payments right you needed the ability to implement the rest of the financial instruments before you could get an economy that did anything that wasn't retail right you know we needed futures we needed options we needed the equivalent of joint stock companies we needed bonds you can't form new emergent complex structures with cash right therefore you know five months we had car and we had cash payments before we had real finance like 5,000 years and that didn't produce any kind of

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=600s) explosive acceleration socially to click inventor of financial instruments to be able to get that kind of thing down so it looked a bit coin Anna felt look the only thing this is gonna be good for is making money on and that face in my life I was still doing alternative work for DoD so I didn't want to be in a position right to explain like why I had a bunch of you know weird state-of-the-art encryption software run around my mother or my bank and I heard mantra unexplained payments so it's kind of like right you know that's there I know what people are gonna get a lot of money with that I told her a whole bunch of people to buy Bitcoin in like 2012 did that thing where it quite spiked about 31 and then dropped it for Dallas when I told people goodbye and you know I stayed out over myself and I was kind of waited and waited wait like they did a talk in 2013 a Bitcoin shindig young Brick Lane and other talk he said look you know bitcoins problem is that they can't innovate right very have a libertarian currency which has an anarchist governance model the split between the libertarian layer and the anarchist layer is making it almost impossible to reach political consensus the only way the Bitcoin is going to be able to evolve is if they produce a libertarian governance where if Bitcoin is managed as a property right that you buy and sell there's a decent chance that that con will become efficient and effective but as it is they can't innovate the real threat of bitcoins long term existence is not the state it's the inability to innovate because you can't be a consensus about how the protocol works you've got consensus protocol you've got no developer consensus and I thought about that I'm like oh right okay so bitcoins problem is gonna be a successor to Bitcoin so I started keeping my eyes open and then Ethereum marches over the horizon with the magic word smart contract and you know smart contracts with a high watermark of the first wave cryptography explosion oh one day there'll be a platform that will do smart contracts and that will change everything and then the theory guys cover the horizon like hey we're doing smart contracts a market that's my ship and so that ship has been sailing for five years now how would you encapsulate those five years what what's your thinking in terms of the trajectory that that project has taken and and where we are now with it well I mean so I'll be quite frank here in engineering terms Ethereum is an enormous disappointment to me um you know there's been haka after haka after haka smart contracts were written in solidity resulting in

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=750s) hundreds of millions of dollars of losses um and the whole notion was the theory of virtual machine codes for a range of languages we should have identified solidity is a bug ridden wasteland really early early on and replaced it and we've had five years to that and we haven't done it and multi-sig wallets still super difficult to use flaky as hell you know there was never a point where there was a multi-sig wallet that was truly truly truly totally audited perfectly and created with the hardware it easy use super secure could be configured by non-technical people you know they've been kind of alphas in all of these directions but you know a mountain if you room would look like a fairy in an apple technology right there'd be a slick efficient scripting language with an excellent debugger there would be perfect hardware integration there would be drag-and-drop interfaces to build simple things like multi SIG's um and there would be a you know a big advocacy arm that made everything we pretty figured out what users need didn't really actively engage in on board and we've had five years we've done basically none of that so years years years ago there was this question about you know where are we in time right if the blockchain is the new web the new Internet where are we in the development of the Internet and I used to say that we were in 1991 where we had a working internet but we didn't have a web because we hadn't figured out how to hyperlink things there was no HTML and so the missing link was that we hadn't figured out how to connect things together so we've got the blockchain we've got so our contracts were and figured out how the pieces of fun together now we realized I was wrong about them because if that's true there would have been an explosion in composability of contracts where everything plugged into everything and you've got this huge technological acceleration not where we are right we're actually in the mid-1970s and what we have is a mass the overfunded equivalent of the homebrew Computer Club where we are tinkering along at the breadboard and transistor level trying to figure out how to make the machine to do something useful so it's not that we're pre World Wide Web we're pre WordStar or were pre VisiCalc right what we're looking for is the spreadsheet and that is disappointing right I really thought we were gonna get a lot more done because we seem to have so much funding available to build technology but somehow I think the

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=900s) emphasis on decentralized governance made it incredibly difficult to put metal on target in terms of simply getting things done and this really worries me because you know for a while everything the world was looking at Ethereum you know I in its I say this you know everything was looking at our taillights right we were in front of everything and everything was falling where we're going now we're beginning to see things are kind of drawing wave 1 either side they don't have the developer communities they don't have the depth of intellectual analysis they don't have the rigor but now what more people have the ambition I'm a little afraid that we're gonna wind up kind of like Pascal right hugely influential super important shape to everything but the world got written in C and I'm really worried about that because you know the the inability to get rid of a language that was obviously very very not fit for purpose you know but we should read a political decision that's validity hard to die and we should replace it with something that worked and I think that that is a profound cultural failing right the inability to kill off our bad ideas under place them with good ones that's a kind of cultural bug that will really hurt a movement in the long run and there are probably 25 things that the foundation should have taken responsibility for delivering and then just bill and didn't and I think a multi CIGNA's top of that list and there then lots of things that should the foundation kind of put a bunch of time and energy into that were probably a waste of time and energy relative to the things that really needed to get um and I'm not gonna make a list of those things but you know we're still in a position Herbert joked by the lack of availability of really fundamental interface components that's nothing so is it is also part of the issue here that I mean I guess it's perfectly natural that we go after finance as there as the sort of the lowest hanging fruit to sort of use this new technology for but to some degree from from listening to some of the other talks that you've done that that seems to be missing the bigger picture tell us a bit about what that bigger picture is and how does material play into that that that vision so for me you know I think it turn as a macro trend right the interviewed over the old phrase software

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=1050s) is he in the world so we're in a position where software has largely taken over the management of data right the software is also largely taken over the management of industrial production it's largely taken over the management of finance and that's great we've got a really effective industrial production with a really effective finance and we've got really effective management of information by other information all that's going fine unfortunately we also seem to be in the process of destroying the ecosystem that produces all of our food and water because we don't seem to be able to get consumption under control and we can't find what we want in the world because we've got no decent search tools for physical things right so if you want to buy a pair of shoes it's extremely difficult to basically take I don't know let's say an x-ray of your feet right on x-ray you use an x-ray because you know that treasure if you but you know take you take a 3d scan of your foot with a phone right you ought to be able to upload that phone to the web and then say brown brogues ah and see 50 pairs of brown brogues and then you'll be able to pick the two or three that you like most and say order by similarity to these pairs boom right there's no reason software can't do that and how much better is your experience of life if that exists and it works and it's like that for everything right it almost all instances we won't be able to simulate a purchase before we perform the purchase we want to be able to describe our need and have the world figure out how to deliver it for us because the world is really really complicated and you know questions like will this TV fit in the alcove or really stressing difficult questions to answer because you want the biggest possible TV that will fit in the alcove but you don't want it to be a tenth of a centimeter bigger well that's a job for software that's a job for measurement that's a job for lidar you know you wipe your phone over the space your phone makes a super accurate estimate of the distances all the TVs have 3d models they were built from you need access to the archive and then you take the data from the phone and the data from the TV manufacturing you combine them it tells you whether the damn thing fits we probably face some variation of that problem 30 times a year right it's everything to do with clothing it's everything to do with fitting things in cars it's everything you do with furniture it's everything to do with camping or packing or travel we're constantly trying to figure out do colors match the objects fit inside of each other and you know and people spend

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=1200s) huge chunks of their lives trying to answer these questions that's a job for machines why haven't we automated that and the consequence of automating that kind of stuff is not just that it becomes easier to buy TV sets it's that we begin to digitize our relationship with the physical world and that allows us to start doing optimization of that process right and you know climate change falls into basically three big lumps right there's transportation there's meat production on there building insulation right so it's basically food travel and heating um but in terms of your personal impact you can't change the food system but you can't change what you eat travel travel is something that gets a lot of criticism but for most individuals it's the commute that defines their footprint not the occasional long trip and then for heating that's really a question of heavy weight insulation of housing and that's a massive massive problem because we haven't really figured out how to retro if we insulate houses we can only really build them in a way which is insulated those are the big kind of large headline categories of environmental consumption but then right underneath the there is the enormous machinery of post-consumer waste everything you buy is over packaged three-quarters of what you buy you get rid of within a year you know and that is a place where there's room for a cheap simple easy digital intervention which will totally change our relationship with the way that we use physical objects and to me the thing that I've been kind of chasing is how do we get enough of the world loaded into the computers that we can do algorithmic optimization of the interface between the human race and its physical environment to the point where we can cut impact to a sustainable level and I mean that's a big thing think about like right now you know what are you actually saying you know see we build a digital model of all of our consumption and then we figure out how much consumption we can actually afford to do we compare it with the digital model and then algorithms suggest how we could behave differently in a way that would cut our consumption to a sustainable level yeah all right and if what that results in is that we get rid of all of the waste in our lives so everything we own is functional and unbeautiful and that's what we wanted to do and when we need

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=1350s) something we don't have it turns up in two hours you know that's a pretty good world right and when you when you no longer need something it goes away in two hours when you close that loop job is done right yeah we've got an Amazon for dropping stuff over your house where is the Amazon for taking away again right and so what I'm trying to get here is that you know there's so much of the mess that we're in globally is as a result of the disorganization of the physical world that comes from the fact that we haven't managed digitize the physical world and that was what I wanted from blockchain I won't have blockchain to be the technology base for a really concerted effort at digitizing the physical world so we can optimize the physical world so we could minimize our impact on the physical world so the idea is to sort of tokenize absolutely everything so that you can account for everything and therefore streamline the process of all production and consumption mm-hmm material goods and food and I mean I think that that kind of stream wising process you know there's a how do I say this um so we think of that as just being about making things efficient but it's not just about making things efficient it's also about all the kind of second third and fourth order and putts you get once you begin to build digital models of things so if we think about social media nobody expected social media because all we had in the early days of the internet was email and making web pages and email was boring and bond of making web pages was hard but once your tools for making web pages in terms of making web pages is offering a lot bad and then somebody realized that you could merge emails and web pages together and that turned into HTML email and then somebody figured out that you know you had mailing lists and mailing lists kind of formed communities and at some point there was this kind of consensus of like wait so we could make kind of communities for people communicated by sending rich text to each other and then you go social media they don't Facebook and Twitter and all the rest these things you know there was a convergence of ideas and it just it's almost by chance that we wound up with social media where you type the text into a website rather than you type the text into an email client and then you look at all the social media through email it was basically an action of history that we wound up with the web browser rather than the email client as the fundamental interface is social media how different the world would be if it all gone

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=1500s) through email and we turned off the decentralized social media system so the that emergence where you build a set tools and you don't know what's gonna happen with them it's not just about digitizing the world as it stands it's once you digitize the world as it stands people will then build on top of those digitization x' and they will build things that are currently unimaginable and it's you know if you think about the fact that we're something like four planets worth of consumption right now in most countries I've seen estimates for the UK that goes high as eight or nine planets a consumption I don't think that's what I think it's about four maybe five is that every particular time period um so if everybody lived the standard of living of the UK we would require five planets to support our needs right so we're roughly consuming five times more than we can um as a rough yardstick five thousand dollars a year of average consumption is your total sustainable environmental footprint with current technology so we're all vastly over consuming relative to long-term sustainability on the current act base so if you get an environment which is heavily digitized you get the ability to create an environment which is incredibly efficient but that efficiency is not gonna come you know if we if we thought of like the paperless office paradigm right oh one day you'll have computers and they'll get all the paper out of offices cause we'll just send each other electronic documents and it'll be really environmentally efficient like well you know why yeah but that's not actually what happened wildly happened is we got social media right and that to me is what we need in the material world if we just get through the brute force digitization step to the point where you get unexpected serendipitous cultural breakthroughs based on top of the technology those are the cultural breakthroughs that I think that have the ability to keep human beings happy ins as fired with vastly less environmental impact right what is it what's the equivalent of social media for physical things what's the equivalent of tinder for physical objects right Amazon Prime will bring stuff to your house in an hour I want something else come and take it away and do you see what I'm kind of grouping for like yeah I just feel like if we go through and we get the digitization a matter right incredibly crazy and powerful productive things will come out of it and we'll be able to see what those things cost in terms of the underlying environmental situation and somehow we'll get cultural

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=1650s) innovation that takes us out of the bottleneck that we're in right now which is our society is destroying the world and nobody wants it to be that way and nobody seems to be able to change it and so as part of that efficiency do you see blockchain having a sort of key component to that I mean I mean bringing it around to you know nft s and non-functional tokens and this idea that they potentially could represent a physical item I mean we know that they'll be able to transfer digital assets but but you know if we could somehow tie physical items to an NF T that might help produce the layers of efficiency that are needed because obviously you have you know we have Amazon we have eBay that we have attempts at trying to place items back into the market so other people can have them but the issue is the barriers to entry of using these systems and there's so much that we have that you can't price effectively enough to warrant the time spent trying to get it back into the marketplace so what we need to do is we need to find layers of efficiency to bring that barrier to entry down so that those items get repurposed into the market and I potentially foresee the movement of tokens on a blockchain representing physical items potentially as part of that efficiency layer well I mean I think that what you've just trade was inevitable right I mean if we're going to teach computers how to represent the physical world they have to be able to handle commodities and they have to be able to handle things which are unique right you know your computer if it's gonna map the physical world it's well and you know accurate enough that you can do algorithmic optimization right there has to be a computer model that says this is five kilograms of sugar but there also has to be an algorithmic model that says this is a Picasso sketch hanging on my wall or a frame right so the thing which is like a Picasso sketch the model in for that is going to be directly equivalent to an NF T right if you implement it in an Oracle database it still has to blow the rules of the physical world if you implement it in Auto blockchain and then if it doesn't NF t it more or less obeys the rules of physical world in that context you know if it's just by the time you build a digital simulation of a unique physical object you have an NF T whether you call an NF D doesn't matter whether it's implement in our database or a

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=1800s) boxer nor ever it doesn't really matter all the constraints that the NFT's Express are simply a reasonably accurate modeling of physical scarcity in the digital system and some people find that kind of horrifying like oh my god why if you go and create scarcity and our wonderful post scarcity real utopia but if we can't teach computers to reason about scarcity how are we going to teach them how to run the damn economy right and that's I mean that's really what they are solve boils down to is we need to be able to do algorithmic optimization of the economy not just for call quantitative finance funds but for everybody and that means your computer has to understand what your car is like hey your car hasn't been maintained in a while it needs to maintain hey your car is currently sitting idle in a garage and you're a holiday don't you rent it to somebody for you right all of that is stuff that's happening to an N F to either represents your car right and that's just what that's gonna look like that's not how it's gonna look when you start modeling water or oil or sugar or things alone these kind of lines which are commodities those are going to go through different software in that stuff about foreign currency um commodity is almost like a currency in lots of ways you know it's got its own menu like the infant divisibility and the story value and a few other things are very similar for commodities and currencies if you're going to build a decent global software platform for managing the physical world you would basically handle commodities like currencies that had geographical locations right I own five kilograms of sugar in my cupboard I also own 20 grams of sugar in my coat pocket right in two little sachets now nobody's gonna use a computer to track the sugar in their coat pocket right but the basic modeling of these kinds of things the physical world has many different kinds of attributes some of them look like NFT's some of them look like currencies some of them look like commodities some of them don't look like anything we use in computers at all like the weather system we spend so much time trying to feed the weather system into computers we still can't get the computers to model it properly so it's it's you know the physical world's a diverse place but huge amounts of the value were wrapped inside of physical objects which are almost exactly like lfts but just to say that NFT's are almost exactly like the real world that's fascinating um in the process of indexing the physical world you will naturally come across a range of items that represent your identity because we tend to coalesce around us items that we have identified as part of

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=1950s) who we are and that is very interesting information to those who are trying to get us to buy more stuff so privacy has to be sort of in tandem with the indexing of the physical world which again potentially leads us back to cryptography and encryption talk a little bit about how you see them both they must both work in parallel to some to some degree so we just launched a long paper which had a long and complicated name then we retitled it the material manifesto which really drills down on this question of the Internet and environmental efficiency and how we build digital representations of things optimize those things get more fish Society and um one of our team who is quite strongly civil libertarian and I'm gonna read this to you said it's a grotesque chimera of dystopian neoliberal surveillance in soviet-style economic planning at that absolutely true if you implemented all of this stuff with big centroids databases that's exactly what you'd get right because we have the total surveillance model where you basically understand her all the physical assets in the society are and who owns them and tell me the state isn't going to use that for tax collection it's going to use it for environmental legislation it's going to use it for all kinds of purposes and then on top of that you're going to wheel in big data and huge algorithms and you're gonna attempt to do algorithmic optimization of the deployment of physical capital right your bicycle is worth more to your next-door neighbor than it is you right now he's coming over to pick it up in two hours right and that's great for you and it's great for the economy but it's gonna feel weird as hell as things begin to roll forward right so that model right you know grotesque chimera of dystopian neoliberal surveillance is soviet-type economic planning the only thing that saves us from that model is DK snarks and other advanced cryptography for blinding transactions because if you could have this universal database and everything is fantastic right and everything is interconnected and everything is right there you have to handle that problem using cryptography other ones you do care you know this chimeric fusion of capitalism and communism united by big data right you and you can't let that happen to the world right that's a really super bad outcome

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3QPVn8OCfc&t=2100s) so if we're going to avoid that super bad outcome you have to be able to rely on the privacy technologies and that has to be a multi-layered approach you know you need Mixmaster type stuff you need z case are exciting stuff you need other confidential transaction technologies you need you know VPNs you need tor you really need you know defense-in-depth against the digital dystopia but the bottom line is that we're in a position where I don't see another way for us to the enormous footprint of industrial civilization without wrecking the world right you know if we've got to cut our environment or consumption button 50 60 80 percent right some of that will be new technology for things like better solar panels some of it we changed agricultural practices but at some point the idea that an ordinary human being has like half a ton of manufactured goods that they don't need and don't want that are actually a cost to them right in things you own that you don't use are costs they take up space you're renting space to store things you don't want you have a house where you could do other things in the space apart from find it's being used as a warehouse why in the world which is not short of buyers can't we sell the stuff we won't do the people out we want it and that's entirely transactional costs because no one knows what anyone else has look more so because there's no layer in which the physical items have been indexed to allow them to talk to each other right there's no search right and that system really of the naive version of it I'd buy the object right I send them money they send me back a digital record that has a complete description of the object if I sell the object on my past the description onto somebody else and they're now the owner of the both the description and the object if there's a product recall they get the notification that tells them the thing they own is wonkey if you want to insure it it's right there in their wall and they insure just you know is haunted or stir things in the wall it verifies that out they owned by the purchaser rights of them or policy all that stuff all are just work right you ought to be will get a notification somebody says hey can I borrow your diesel generator right what I have a diesel generator it's in the public market sure I'll lend you my diesel generator or you know I don't like the look your credit score I'm gonna give it to you right that you know there are lots of you know if we had a perfectly fair open or honest society this would be super easy to do right I used to say in the early days of Ethereum right you know in a fair and honest society a vending machine is a

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/758-2.md (part 2 of 3).
End of [758] #3 Vinay Gupta, Indexing the physical world, part 1 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.