# CCForum London 2019/Vinay Gupta. Blockhain and the Future of Humanity > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [777]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: video, 2019-11-25 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVcVYME8JIE. 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): Duplicate of Manifesto keynote. - Career works it belongs to: - The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out of ideas (2010): One-page paper: the richest fifth are eating the planet, so the next economy has to be at peace with other... (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) - 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: - 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) - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine) - Topics: Capitalism, consumption & resources (40%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (20%); Information markets — universal registers and digital twins (20%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Mattereum Manifesto (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); market access (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); collectibles (2 here; 27 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); scenario planning (1 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); Shatner (2 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); digital identity (2 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); durable goods (1 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); second-hand (1 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); climate refugees (1 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); William Shatner (1 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2019, 1 undated) - Importance: core-text score 0.18 (1.00 is the top), number 382 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [735] [Vinay Gupta - Mattereum (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/735.md): close in content (cosine 0.91) - [572] [How To Address Climate Change: Diplomacy, Politics,... (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/572.md): close in content (cosine 0.90) - On the same works, just before: [758] [#3 Vinay Gupta, Indexing the physical world (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/758.md); [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) - On the same works, just after: [718] Conversations #5 - Vinay Gupta (2019); [191] [My Thoughtmenu on Enlightenment | The Bucky-Gandhi... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/191.md); [239] [The Future of Stuff (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/239.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: CCForum London 2019/Vinay Gupta. Blockhain and the Future of Humanity, video, 2019-11-25, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVcVYME8JIE; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [777], https://guptaoption.com/texts/777.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVcVYME8JIE&t=0s) so let me talk a little bit about this fella and then we'll talk about some other stuff so what I'm doing right now is a project to do digital identities for physical things and physical things you could broadly divide into two piles things which get worth less over time and things which get worth more over time so because we're a start-up and we don't want to go broke we're focusing on things which were worth more over time which initially means things like collectibles and we're fortunate enough to have William Shatner be our first customer and there will be a range of Star Trek and other Shatner memorabilia coming onto the Ethereum main chain in the next probably three months possibly six weeks and this is a test object you could come take a look at this if you look for a document online called the Mattereum manifesto you can read all by the are told details of how this is implemented in the legal structures which allow us to make strong guarantees of provenance and authenticity now before I got into the blockchain space I spent about 14 years doing energy policy large-scale Refugee management planning and worst-case scenario planning for a variety of government and so why am i doing stuff with collectibles when the world is on fire we're up to our neck and climate refugees and you know what exactly took me into the blockchain space and the answer is we need to get computers to deal with the real world properly this is this is a very simple and naive thing to say but at the end of the day we've got 9 billion people the normal model of the economy has left a billion people starving and a billion people fat including myself and we've got an enormous amount of defence spending most of which the militaries themselves say is misallocated and we don't seem to know where anything came from what it costs or whether slaves were involved in its production so what I want to suggest is that our handling of the material world is a total shambles and that's what's reducing the enormous amount of hassle that you see in things like deforestation it's what's causing the topsoil erosion it's what's causing [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVcVYME8JIE&t=150s) things like climate change that entire set of structures is being driven by the fact that we don't seem to be able to connect cause to effect in the physical world you go to a shop you buy something you have no idea where it came from you have no idea what it costs downstream you don't know whether it left a lake of poison in some your Chinese village where they manufactured it you've no way of understanding the impact of your actions and if we bind people to the impact of their actions can we blame them for acting unethically if you don't know what's really happening as a result of your lifestyles how could you ever be expected to modify your life cycle if we if we don't keep track of what's happening in the world how could we ever expect to change what's happening in the world does this fix ants I mean you know if you don't measure anything how can you modify it we're just guessing so we've gone through centuries of trying to get better control of things it's kind of one of the hallmarks of Western civilization is we try and achieve control and we got really effective control of information over centuries of librarianship librarians jobs were to know exactly hot information walls where it could be located how it could be obtained who had written at what the provenance of the information was whether it was accurate that librarianship practice then poured onto the Internet in the form of all the work that was done to organize documents and produce standards for things like search data when we moved onto the web and that badrock of librarianship and all the statistical modeling which was done of information as a way of doing things like internet search all of that stuff is why we now don't consider information to be scarce anymore and anybody over the age of about probably 35 will remember information scarcity from the time when you had a question for your pair and they didn't know the answer and it wasn't in a book that was in your house and you were stuck in less you went to the library and even then they might not know and that period is completely gone so we're in a position where we've got enormous scarcity of physical things but we have monitor for about thirty years to get rid of information scarcity and we did it for a range of things right we started with text then we did images then we did sound then we did short films then we did long films then we did radio sotol intents and purposes we just went category by category by category by category eradicating information scarcity so the next thing on the [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVcVYME8JIE&t=300s) Internet's list of things to do and note that I say the Internet and not the blockchain is to do the same kind of eradication of scarcity for physical goods um does anybody feel like they own too much stuff and it's poorly organized right does anybody feel like we've got total control of their physical environment they don't have any stream at or that they really should have gotten rid of and half of yeah I thought so right so we're in a culture where we've got this enormous glut produced by not in industrial mass production there's a kind of unstructured river of stuff coming out of factories and that river of stuff was driven by the creation of things like total quality management and before that specialization of Labor on production lines so we built an enormous production machine that was based on scientific reasoning about how to make production more efficient over the past 50 years we did something very similar for investment we did quote quantitative finance we did portfolio theory we basically went through and we applied math and some sort of scientific methods and rationales to investment and to production the consumption and the waste functions in society haven't been touched at all consumption it's basically an analogue swamp where an object that was conceived of on a computer managed an ERP system financed by a hedge fund that was using algorithms to figure out where they were going through the money right you walk into a shop you pay for it with a digital card which is you know processing payments through an OLTP system and then as soon as you take the thing home it completely loses its digital identity we have no idea what it is or where it came from other than what happens to be printed on the side of the box and if you want to resell the thing you have to go through all of the labor of redefining what it is when you type the information into eBay before you can pass it on to another seller this is happening because we don't have stable identities for physical things physical things have a stable identity through the investment system and through the production system when they go into the consumption system and the waste system they've no stable identity they're essentially anonymous trash as soon as you buy it and this is why after you buy something it's worth 50 or 80 percent less and you paid for it as soon as you walk out in the shop it basically becomes separated it's digital identity is removed and thrown away because the retailer is no longer maintaining it and the manufacturer is no longer been [7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVcVYME8JIE&t=450s) tailing it and you just walk out of the shop with a piece of trash and you use it as long as you use it and then it goes straight into landfill so what that's creating is an enormous mismatch between the production systems and the consumption systems an enormous river of goods which are being junked when they are perfectly usable if we can only identify what they were and an enormous loss of money to consumers right because everybody is in a position where the things that they want typically last longer than our desire for them right whether it is a suit or a car or a pair of shoes in most cases unless you're staying very close to classic design you will buy something it will be great for a while then fashion will change then you wouldn't walk rid of it right but you can't get rid of it without taking a 50 or a 90 percent loss or just throw it away your choices are you store it indefinitely in the back of a wardrobe you give it to a charity shop or you sell it on eBay but even selling it on eBay requires a bunch of labor so what this is creating is a cliff where new goods are up here then there's a 50 to 90 percent drop then there's the second-hand market but we're in a world where there's actually a nearly infinite pool of unserved demand right there are plenty of poor people in this country but there are another three and a half billion poor that self of market access in the developing world and another 2 billion beyond thought that are barely connected to the global market at all so why is anything going to landfill when there are millions of billions of people going without and the answer is because we throw away all the information so the objects become detached from their stories we can't do search we can't find market places for these things and so there's an enormous pile of stuff which is going to landfill rather than being reused to end of life and if we fix that we can keep most of the structure of a consumer society going where goods are still you know available for purchase you can do what you like with them as long as they go directly into efficient secondary markets so the goods are in use by some human being right until the end of their life the actual amount of environmental impact that you have by buying something is divided by all the people that and then subsequently use it so what this provides is a possible Avenue for us to radically cut our environmental impact at the same time as we rapidly increase our quality of life last material clutter higher quality [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVcVYME8JIE&t=600s) goods efficient secondary markets you buy something you use it until you're bored you pass it on to somebody else you recover most of the value that you paid for it and you know that those things will be in use until they which we fall apart and that creates the necessary economic incentives to do quality manufacturing of long life durable goods because we get away from the idea that you basically just buy things and trash them and we get into the idea that we have a kind of collective custodianship of the physical assets of the human race so when we take resources out of nature and then manufacture things with them we know that the object will be in use by some human being mostly not us right until the it falls to pieces and if you think about things like stainless steel or polypropylene that could be hundreds of years so that's what I think we should be working on in the blockchain space on the internet space in general we need something which is the equivalent of a total quality control which completely revolutionized mass production we need an equivalent structure for consumption and waste management and we need it now is a critical part of meeting the UN sustainable development goals thank you [Applause] [Music] --- End of [777] CCForum London 2019/Vinay Gupta. Blockhain and the Future of Humanity. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [718] Conversations #5 - Vinay Gupta (2019) (no text here); the most closely related, [735](https://guptaoption.com/texts/735.md) Vinay Gupta - Mattereum (2022); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.