# Cryptoeconomics Lab: Vinay Gupta (part 2 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [761], part 2 of 2. 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, 2020-04-16 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p80tTXgdyM. 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): Secondary economies idea relevant to camp labour markets.
- 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)
  - Taking a crack at a practical system (introducing the ESCROWNYM) (2012): Blog essay proposing the escrownym: an identity lodged with escrow brokers under a legally binding... (suggested by machine)
  - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (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)
- Topics: Crypto compliance & money laundering (43%); Smart contracts, law & arbitration (14%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Bermuda (5 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2007); scams (7 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); masks (9 here; 20 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); ICO (6 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); The DAO (2 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); SEC (3 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); Legalese (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); basic income (2 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); DAO (2 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); IPO (1 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2012)
- Importance: core-text score 0.34 (1.00 is the top), number 203 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): close in content (cosine 0.97)
  - [567] [The Fourth Mattereum Physical Asset NFT Meetup 8th Feb 2023 (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/567.md): close in content (cosine 0.96)
- On the same works, just before: [862] [Interview VINAY GUPTA about Ethereum, Decarbonizing by... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/862.md); [758] [#3 Vinay Gupta, Indexing the physical world (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/758.md); [251] [ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/251.md)
- On the same works, just after: [731] [Vinay Gupta l The Internet of Agreements l Meaning 2017 (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/731.md); [120] [blockone - Sign In (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/120.md); [233] [Quaddome (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/233.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: Cryptoeconomics Lab: Vinay Gupta, video, 2020-04-16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p80tTXgdyM; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [761], https://guptaoption.com/texts/761.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[39:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p80tTXgdyM&t=2370s) hundred and sixty countries and a appoints a private judge and to oversee disputes associated with the physical object that we're talking about if the deformation describing that physical object turns out to be in error and you can make a claim if you sign this contract if you've paid for cover you can make a claim and ask that that guarantee is used to refund you the damage you've taken from the information is guaranteed being wrong and this is a literal plain English legal contract it was on on on on and it's packed with all manner of wondrous legal complexity which is why it's something that can be enforced globally economically it's not just that it provides you access to global justice its access to global justice and weep enough you can actually use it in a lot of cases and now if we hit sign and pay it will pop up the transaction into where's it gone if you don't know if I'm a mouse wonder come on meta mask um okay so meta mask seems to have gotten lost somewhere but in any case you could excited and pay it pops up what a window meta mask appears you send money you are now the legal counterparty to a contract with version certifying this information and Mattereum is not party to that contract so it's literally peer-to-peer authentication of physical goods using the blockchain to record the legal contracts that people have entered into and to give people the payment of four of those contracts and right now it handles object authentication and before the pandemic kicked in we're about a month away from being able to do a sale so first I authenticate why is that I'm buying then I buy it and you could just build up layer by layer by layer with different contracts to cover all these cases I here's another object this here is a crypto kaiju so it's basically a printed crypto kitty and you will notice that it has an RFID tag strategically placed upon its person I'm and if you scan nothing with a phone it gives you a unique ID which allows you to identify what it is your holder and there's some new technology around which actually puts a key pair on an NFC like that that's a NFC not RFID and that key pair or is you actually sign transactions on the sticker which is enormous ly powerful in terms of providing authentication for them so that is an example of a technology you just can see

[42:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p80tTXgdyM&t=2520s) if we can stop this okay my back yeah back so that's an example of a technology which is designed for function in the real world and we went after collectibles and whined and fine are basically because that's where there were a bunch of transactions are reachable and amusingly that project makes very little sense to procure people crypto people like even crypto investors we try and explain why is you'd want to be able to prove what a thing is in the physical world and their eyes is glazed over because most of the moon one carry-on bag of stuffing with a ver B&B so the idea of owning physical property seems completely retro to them but for the people that are physical property people museum people wine people custodians all this kind of stuff these technologies make perfect sense like they really are very clear they understand exactly what they're for and now for us I'm looking at these crazy markets for masks and for ventilators and for drugs pharmaceuticals and and I'm just looking at that like you know I kind of expected to spend my next year working on toy collections with William Shatner and wine I know it's like we might be gonna get into the business of trying to stop people being killed but buying masks that are substandard that will completely not protect them in the event that there weren't in a hospital Sam um and it's taken me a little bit of time to psychologically Brett for that but I think that's the direction that we're heading and um and obviously we're fundraising again to try and get the wherewithal to actually make that happen um but this is the kind of thing which is seat at the table right if we solve the problem of math or masculine tissa and if we organize double-blind testing of masks by a distributed network of labs where all the test information is logged on chain and then statisticians can crunch over that to figure out whether the masks are good and also whether the labs are good right you send them a mix of masks which would be not fair indicated to work under set masks which are up for testing and you put all of that data into statistical analysis framework um it's definitely possible that that would be a seat at the table not just for us as a company but for crypto as a whole because it would be one problem that had gotten solved and there are probably 50 other niches opening up because the existing world systems are under such enormous stress but we have to think about having such

[44:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p80tTXgdyM&t=2670s) high standards of integrity that people begin to forget all the ICO garbage that was shipped out there and all the money that was made and lost by unfair means all the force on the fraud um and we have to basically get into position or crypto means we're telling you the truth and if we're not you can prove it and you will be able to get compensation right crypto hast a mean honest fair trade and that's where I'll stop time

[45:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p80tTXgdyM&t=2701s) for questions thanks a lot Renee so we have one statement and one question that came in and first of all I really want to say that is refreshing or at least very motivating to see other people very clearly acknowledging what everybody kind of already knows about krypton it it isn't as respected and that all these scams that were going on do not help anybody and that there needs to be change in direction there was one question in the disco chat about whether you or anybody else here is aware of any projects that come close to any word to a no fraud system and of course matter iam is going in a in a good direction but do you have any answer to that so I think some of the work um so I think a Jones for illegal Dow so real Dow is doing quite an interesting thing right they're only the crew gonna be much more interesting in a year but what they're starting with is the idea that you take the legal framework of a company which is given to you by a government and then you 100% pocket with clever crypto stuff so that you can see where the share registers are in the board resolutions and all the rest of this kind of machinery completely transparent inside of that Center so I think that's kind of amazing um because I mean shareholders are notoriously not octave right US companies large publicly traded companies theory the shareholders direct the directors of the company in practice the shareholders are strongly discouraged from voting and most of them to abort it so the idea that you could actually begin to straighten out some of the corporate nonsense by having publicly traded companies that were actively controlled and managed by their shareholders so if they started doing abusive stuff the shareholders vote to stop them hey you know I think now is a small step on a path which could lead to that kind of reformation of corporate governance and so I'm very excited by that and there are 50 million track and trade project track and trace projects right half for food for vegetables you know swordfish tuna electronics lots and lots of people doing authenticity work over there all of that counts they're all pushing fraud out of the supply chain so yeah I think I think that are a lot of disconnected pieces around of that picture what we're lacking is an

[47:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p80tTXgdyM&t=2851s) ideological stand right you know non-aggression principle makes a lot sense to what people as I say I think it's not wrong but it's also not sufficient um you know the idea that we could actively make enforcement of no fraud a critical part of what we're doing in a way which really means no fraud like fraud was not committed nobody would look at this and call it fraud legally speaking it's not fraud the idea that we could take that as being an ideological platform where you would look at a corporate project and say that fails the non-aggression principle and we're not gonna let that fin prison there's a lot to be said for that and because we've got the ideological machinery we just haven't applied it at home we're all about telling other people no force no fraud well what about us can I can i interject something here really quick wasn't Haven a man thanks for coming so cool what a great what what a what a great piece of information if you'd like to continue this conversation with anybody for the right after the chat all you got to do is click in on create your own room and you'll get a pop up and you can name it and that link will then be persistent for the length of the chat the the conference it's persistent gypsy room and tweet that out on Twitter or are posted in any channels and you can continue this conversation with anybody that you're interested in just letting you know about that feature cool yeah this is the quiet comprehensive piece of software this is a nice tool thank you where we've built it for this and now it's an open source project available on github great going grant and it's we're working together with the Ethereum Foundation neath global and we're going to be doing multiple conferences with this after this so it's amazing to see it all work rooted for this thing I'm even more amazed to see it works hard yeah Garret Lorre doing for a long time and he built this in react and we've done all the integrations and everything and it's gonna iterate forward it's only got those the web 2.0 features now but of course we can use unlock protocol or kick back or any of the things to to limit entry and we've solved the troll problem which you'd see that all all users were moderators now we have a token system for the moderators so Jacob will talk and I have a token and we've got all over it so sorry for

[50:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p80tTXgdyM&t=3001s) interrupting on that super cool device for guys nice work I mean I go back over to the crypto economics lab man okay cool thanks Michael to go a bit back on that before you presented a bit on the global legal framework that you're trying to get into reality now what I was wondering is with possession of objects and information about objects it can be quite clear in a lot of jurisdictions on on what the rules for that are so that might make it easier to have it a bit more standardized but once you're moving out of possession of objects that becomes a lot unclear is there are there any steps of going into that direction or is the focus right now really on on getting better as perfect as possible okay so there's there's new law and there's old law and old laws typically things like real estate and real estate is just every country has its own weird ways of doing things in those weird ways cannot be changed because you know there's trillions of dollars walked into the existing frameworks a new law patent copyright and other kinds of intellectual property most corporate law involving you know stocks and shares bonds this kind of stuff most of that law is pretty standard internationally and so there's no reason that you can't take a fairly broad approach on those issues like if I sell you a copyright license and it does a common thing most countries in the world will work pretty much the same way for that license you might have to do some localization for it but generally speaking not so difficult and the other approach is that you can domicile intellectual property in places like say Bermuda where you just have a corporation in Bermuda where I take my work and I sell a license to the corporation in Bermuda the corporation Bermuda then resells that license so from either once that license but all the legal structures are in Bermuda and then I get a revenue stream for that and that's one of the ways that you can regularize and the law applies so situation and but I mean the bottom line is that what will inevitably emerge from this kind of process over the next 10 to 20 years is something that looks like satellite mapping but for legal systems so you're wind up with one or more companies or a project like OpenStreetMap and there's a project called

[52:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p80tTXgdyM&t=3151s) clean ah I want to say and which is taking a crack at the kind of open street map approach but their idea and you know the core idea is it you just wind up with a hugely complex database of all of the different legal structures in the world represented in a wave which is machine readable so you know in a given jurisdiction where they're given legal operation is legal right and it's just like you don't it's like route mapping if you want to do this right in this jurisdiction it's a straight line in this jurisdiction you have to make to stop in the middle and do the following operation before you can do the next part and you can see how big a job that would be right I mean that's a gigantic effort but if you look at the amount of time that went into Wikipedia or open street it's not a bizarrely inconceivable effort and if we hung on that map of global war on global regulation worked out you'd start with the areas which are highest value and easiest and then gradual you creep out and get more and more and more coverage but what that gives us is the ability to start automating compliance I tell a machine what is that I want to accomplish the machine goes and figures out the legal pathway through the system if the machine can't find a legal pathway through the system it raises a flag and says go get a human to help me and then we feel in a lawyer and the lawyer figures out how to do it and then that knowledge is transferred to the Machine so next time we don't have to call her lawyer not that I'm suggesting we automate the lawyers out of existence or anything but just in principle requires we don't want to annoy users enemies either I don't think a lot of lawyers are very afraid of Technology specifically because they think it's going to take their jobs but my you know history seems to suggest that every time a profession is exposed to tools which theoretically replace the profession all that happens is the professionals climb on top of those tools and the field becomes a vastly more productive and people get much better value for money when they spend in the field classic example that is graphic design where everybody thought that everybody was gonna be their own graphic designer because of desktop publishing in the nineteen eighties in 1990s and all the humpin is the great graphic designers were so much more empowered by the tools that the global standard or design went through the roof and so I think the same would actually happen with lawyers like if we didn't large scale legal automation all that would happen is the lawyers would do amazing new creative work and you'd get much more sophisticated use of law it's not that you would wind up with you know a whole bunch of lawyers begging in the

[55:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p80tTXgdyM&t=3301s) streets with ten caps right which is by the way how the French revolutions started nobody's doing that again but I think that what you would get is just a vastly more sophisticated use of automated real contract creation tools yeah I absolutely agree with you here and I think that even if these are unfortunate times this huge push to Home Office to using digital infrastructure might also help those rather traditional working places where digital infrastructure was not yet integrated into the regular workflow yeah where we might see a shift to more automation to more usages for example lawyers using automated workflows for their day-to-day business yeah yeah I think that's absolutely true one question the chart which is what was my concern with doubt and so the the problem with those in general um is threefold so the first thing is they don't provide much legal protection so there's a pretty good chance that if you are in a position where you could go to voting rights in a dhow and somebody else loses money because of a decision that you either did vote on or maybe could have theoretically voted on you might be in a position where they can sue you right so it may be the participation in dowse is only safe if you're a hundred percent anonymous and even then you know liability transfer what is you know I think there are a bunch of sticky unresolved legal problems around Taos problem one problem - how do we decide when the DAO's purposes or technology have to be changed what happens if somebody you know if circumstance has changed in such a way that the thing that a DA was create do no longer it's worth doing how do we alter direction who's responsible for making the call and what do you do with minorities that are 100% against the decision which is made okay maybe they can sell it and buy something else but we we just have to be careful that we're not creating a system where you've got tyranny of the majority in a position where nobody has any legal rights because the the in law the rights of minorities are protected specifically so if you've got 51% of a company that doesn't mean that you can then just print stock give it to yourself and then completely screw the guys I had 49% they have a set of structural protections in place and it's not clear that that kind of thinking has come to dowse in any kind of sophisticated way yet um and

[57:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p80tTXgdyM&t=3451s) then the third thing is I mean really fundamental which is why are we replicating corporations more less unit for unit on the blockchain like if we wanted a better world why are we taking a system that seems to be super broken and super extractive and re-implementing it right we made that mistake with money we reimplemented money in the disaster like money and money turns out to be super destructive in the ways that we've currently done it right all of the pathologies of the real economy you know an environment dominated by enormously rich people very variable temperament who are completely unaccountable to everybody else and are hugely manipulating the game for their own advantage wasn't that the system that we were trying to fix right so you know same thing with corporations why have we gone to reimplemented the corporations right I just feel like maybe building a scale-model of a broken system and calling it a new system may not actually be progress right and this is not to say that I have an immediate clear idea about what we should be building instead but I would like to see diverse experiments in these areas rather than a slavish reimplementation of the broken systems of the real world you know let a thousand flowers bloom thanks for the answer you know I think you're absolutely right

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End of [761] Cryptoeconomics Lab: Vinay Gupta, part 2 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [731](https://guptaoption.com/texts/731.md) Vinay Gupta l The Internet of Agreements l Meaning 2017 (2020); the most closely related, [565](https://guptaoption.com/texts/565.md) Coin Telegraph AMA with Mattereum's Vinay Gupta 14th... (2023); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.