# Vinay Gupta and Ian Grigg Speak On Arbitration and Identity in Chamas, Informal Cooperatives > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [780]. 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, 2023-02-05 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no5RF91vtSQ. Text: automatic captions, uncorrected - 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): Village-scale arbitration and finance model for camp communities. - 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) - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (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) - 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: Smart contracts, law & arbitration (62%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (12%); Open government & anti-corruption (12%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: trust structure (2 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); dispute resolution (5 here; 48 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); skin in the game (1 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); AML (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); DNS (1 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); KYC (1 here; 27 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); standards (1 here; 87 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); India (1 here; 88 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); contracts (1 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated) - Importance: core-text score 0.46 (1.00 is the top), number 125 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - On the same works, just before: [573] ['Digital Assets, Digital Chattel' (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/573.md); [571] [The Second Mattereum Physical Asset NFT Meetup 21 Sept 2022 (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/571.md); [568] [The Third Mattereum Physical Asset NFT Meetup, 30 Nov 2022 (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/568.md) - On the same works, just after: [567] [The Fourth Mattereum Physical Asset NFT Meetup 8th Feb 2023 (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/567.md); [566] [Why Global Trade Will Inevitably Move To The Blockchain (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/566.md); [712] [Compilation: Vinay Gupta (Mattereum / Ethereum) on Visa,... (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/712.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: Vinay Gupta and Ian Grigg Speak On Arbitration and Identity in Chamas, Informal Cooperatives, video, 2023-02-05, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no5RF91vtSQ; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [780], https://guptaoption.com/texts/780.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no5RF91vtSQ&t=0s) artillery the trauma thing right what you have is a community level mandate to the blockchain yes rather than a sort of sovereign level mandate to the blockchain yes it's a much more legally contained intelligible use of the technology rather than this kind of like we're going to issue a new Global Currency with the Central Bank of the internet thing which is the Bitcoin mindset yeah you have a very small feedback loop so when it goes wrong you stop yeah whereas if you're talking about the state level thing when it goes wrong you double down it is rules and rules and it rolls and rolls and rolls until we're all broken so coming back to channel passer and the way that they do dispute resolution they have they have certainly they have the same problem that everybody else in Africa or Latin America has or some parts of Asia but the courts are both unreliable at the macro scale at the large-scale dispute resolution process because they are corruptable if you like and the other thing is that they're totally inaccessible to people on two dollars a day oh that's interesting you do not get to resolve a dispute if you're not a relatively well-off person because you can't afford to talk to a lawyer right and you can't afford to even necessarily make the trip to the courthouse or file the first briefly you literally just can't get into the system you aren't it's completely shut out for you so the the locals have a very strong sense of community and they also have um if not in practice but certainly within their minds or their Memories the notion of tribal Elders so consequently there's always somebody you can go to if you need to resolve a dispute there's always a sense that we could do this so we could do that etc etc so the charmer is basically constituted on the sort of communities Cooperative agreement and then that comes with a share of model of District resolution so that's coming baked into the social tier and they're already using that on paper yes but it's not explicit um it's in the sense there is that when we started talking about arbitration and dispute resolution as a formal process they all automatically understood it but they hadn't experienced it in such a formal fashion before ah so us things are things just are sort of getting hashed out um in the sense that they worry about the disputes when they happen and they don't have this uh shall we say contractual sense where in your contract [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no5RF91vtSQ&t=150s) you write a clause that refers to Spirit resolution to a particular Forum right which is what we in the west do customary they would not do that because in a sense they don't have a forum where they can take their disputes so they don't bother to imagine it up front right however if you come to them with a forum that works they're quite happy to adopt it because they know the existing Forum isn't for them right so we we found it was actually extraordinarily easy in comparison to the West selling Western communities on arbitration yeah is a hard one it's really hard they think they've got access to the court already yes and they think their courts will protect them and they think that their courts will look after them yeah now that can't possibly be true because when you go to court one party has to lose and one party has to win right so somebody's not going to be protected yes yes Chris Reed talks about this that up front everybody wants to lose a severe possible sanction yes they've never imagined they'll be the one in default that's right yes exactly so there's this very big perception that our courts are good and especially if you go um to the larger the country gets the more the belief uh in their own legal system sure sure so explaining how to do dispute resolution at a community level is very hard in the west yeah it's a hard in a sense that was a system that we kind of migrated away from hundreds of years ago yes I'm thinking of like the old days I don't know whether this is true or not but um where the jury was the first 12 men that came out of church that morning right something like that yes yes um so there's all these practices that we've gradually got away from and if you go back into the old days the court was for example a franchise and somebody owned the franchise and the execution it was a franchise and somebody owned the job of executing and that was their income yeah so we got away from that system we we went to a more State oriented model because that was thought to be more independent and standards could improve which it doesn't in many respects in many places I mean it's it's relatively uniform Justice yes it might have the same you know it might have it has roughly the same amount of rare old tiers it's not that the small claim stuff is junk and the high level stuff is pretty good right two or three degrees we've got about the same area regardless of the size case yes which is not bad it's an achievement but doesn't help you okay Jasmine help us in Kenya so in Kenya we [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no5RF91vtSQ&t=300s) found it a relatively easy cell to put in place an arbitration framework now the trick that is probably uh the thing that will be immediately striking the Western mind is how can they possibly afford arbitration the answer is you use them to provide the arbitrators right you get the communities themselves to provide an arbitrator right right and we simply when we did it in practice we had a um we simply chose the president of the Chama to be one arbitrator and I was chosen to be the other arbitrator so they gave us two arbitrators in a camera of 30 people yeah now the next thing is of course that if if you do get into a some sort of violent debate about funds have been stolen or whatever our chammer might not be able to adjudicate that right so we can go to the next trauma and pull the arbitrator from there and use that person who's now independent to listen to the sides and come up with a determination and you could go as far out across that social graph as you do tell you somebody that everybody reads is independent yes that's fantastic yes and and so that's where we're sort of aiming for in the future we're not we're obviously not there by any stretch of the imagination but the job part of being in the community is that you have to provide if you like jury service but in this case arbitral service so that at some stage you might think you know I'm happily doing my stuff but suddenly you get called upon right too right perfect things something's gone wrong yes yes and and that's what being part of a community is you have to support the community where it gets into trouble right and this is part of the responsibility that people take on in the initial contractual arrangement in Western business context there is generally speaking no underlying living system uh that is transacting before the contracts are in place generally speaking people might agree that there's going to be a deal but stuff lessons are happening until the paperwork and stuff and our lawyers generally enforce that pretty strictly if yes if if you're in that frame of mind so the notion then is that the software is fitted to the paperwork and the paperwork is fitted to the business process yes but none of it really interacts with any kind of fundamental social structure no so what we have is a much longer bridge between the cryptography and the thing yes because the thing is even one or two more steps less mechanistic than contract one yes yes I do like your challenges [7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no5RF91vtSQ&t=450s) and that is one of the one of the key things which is now emerging uh you know something we've worked out back at 2000 or so um to make this work to make it work properly you have to start from the community aspect or more precisely you have to start from the communication aspect so the the starting point for building this process is not digital cash it's actually digital chat in the sense that you want to build your community around messaging right right We messaged back and forth and you just think are we going to organize next week's Chama meeting what is that it's a series of messages going back and forth and on top of that you build your digital cash system or your digital asset system right okay so this is quite some important Thinking Inside of status economic space agency lots of folks are coming to this convergence idea that the money passes along the conversational Channel yes I think exactly I think even Google might return Well everybody's doing it now but the the idea has been around for a long time I first wrote about it in uh 2000 or so wow and I actually figured it out in you know 2000 um and you you might remember that Skype was sold to eBay this is the traditional medium grade 15-year one well you know generation ago I told you exactly how this all to be done 15 years of pain yes so Skype was sold to eBay for that purpose oh eBay we're having trouble with their paper so they thought why don't we put it into a cryptographically secure framework yeah I remember Skype in the mid-2000s was the word in security absolutely now if you take Skype and you take the messaging well you've got secure delivery secure reliable delivery of messaging how hard is it to stick a cache in that that's what they wanted to do but didn't but they didn't that's another story it's another story yes which leaves this enormous way to open space yes okay yes so we we have the governance in the form of the community appointed dispute resolution uh agent in that environment yes you've got the chat logs which tell people what was promised and what was said and who was going to do what exactly uh and all of this has got at least some solid cryptographic backing to it so there's no evidence chain in there yeah okay that I mean this all seems like it's circling around something which is [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no5RF91vtSQ&t=600s) of course identity how do we know who's who inside of the system yes turns out that one's a soul tissue it is oh yes full numbers the community knows everybody okay when you form a trauma yeah it's on the only format with people you know very well right because on the table in a micro trust environment that's right exactly so the community has identity already wrapped up right the only thing they've got to do is record it in some fashion now it turns out to be pretty trivial in in Kenya the rules you have to have um sufficient details of the Kenya ID so if there's a government-issued ID here you're done look at it and because it's because a channel is a very light-scale thing we're not talking kyc and AML and anything like that this is just a savings Club yeah so we don't actually need to do very much right right so they have this very lightweight rule but but actually you can go a lot further because of course you can't take the Kenya ID or a passport or whatever you can't just sort of distribute it really really outside the charmer but what you can do is capture information about who is there and you can make a summary record if the chamber itself can become an authority say a little more about that so the you somehow have almost like voting inside of the channel and who's who no well say one more I didn't quite understand yeah so so of course the problem or the desire that certainly in the west people have about identity is that they want to go to some institution like a government or a corporation or you know an Uber driver or something like that and present something that suddenly makes it all good yeah yeah absolutely they're searching that you have a hard identity credential your band your password on the table and there are no further questions about who you are the the default or the knee-jerk answer to that is you bang your passport on the table and now everything is hunky-dory yeah yeah but actually that doesn't really measure up in terms of risk analysis because if I put down a passport from one country and you're from another country yes now what happens if we break a deal for you know a thousand dollars or something like that are you going to pursue me to another country absolutely it doesn't work you're outside the record bubble yeah and in fact even if you think about the the process in the local community a [12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no5RF91vtSQ&t=750s) court case at the local magistrates courts is going to cost you a thousand so what's happening is that the the identity document has become an expectation right but it's not actually delivering the trust or a course that you want because we think it's a promise of enforcement and it's actually not even if we know who this guy is we're not going to do anything and you can take it to the extreme so if you talk about say uh the Germans or the Swiss or something like that my name is my bond if you've presented your name and a passport that's it they will act very well uh but if you go to um South America or um places in India and so forth and you get somebody's name is that going to be much use to you probably not especially if they you know they spot you as a foreigner sure so so the issue is not the identity the issue is how do I get recourse for something going wrong right right now coming back to the channels we all know who everybody is in the channels if I can present to you um a fairly good indication that I come from a particular Chama oh and that trauma is in the network okay so the charmer is the namespace yes you are bulb old truck charmer there you go this is excellent or Farm Sharma yes is Fred of weaving charm or whatever they are yes and you have his name space so the people are connected which is probably exactly what they did in the Villages Bob Smith is Bob the Smithy yeah literally you know and Bob from that particular Village that's how it was done in the old days yeah absolutely so if I come to you and I give you credible evidence phones crypto and so forth though I'm of a particular channel right and you know that chama's in the network yeah yeah got it you now know that you can go for a course and this is kind of community level DNS yes and you don't need to know my name and the child has a bunch of assets exactly skin in the game so somebody comes and represents themselves as being from a particular trauma the trauma has authorized them to use that credential they go to another trauma to rent a truck buy a truck whatever it is they're doing do some trade do something that's done something goes wrong and you go to the challenge hey this person that you warranted yeah this person is going with my truck yes and now we've got people we've got assets we've got evidence etc etc so you begin to build accountability yes unpresumably if somebody doesn't honor the warrants yes [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no5RF91vtSQ&t=900s) ability trade yes and we did all that without your identity yeah do you know um Matthew of whole chain so he is a big big advocate of what he calls uh discretionary enforcement so this is basically two ways that you can punish people who misbehave the first is to go around and take their stuff the other is to not give them more stuff in future yeah refuse to trade yes that in itself is sanctioned if it's comprehensive yes and he's got this whole kind of model that this stuff worked inside of the small village level but it doesn't scale because we don't have the right Machinery right he thinks Holo train is not Machinery yes and I have my doubts about how the whole chain is that Machinery but his analysis is very strong right and a whole lot of stuff actually does work inside the village and then stops working outside the village magic Dunbar number exactly yeah exactly and that's kind of um that's why Jammers are that number because they're limited by down by number and this is the yeah Universal thing right informal systems of enforcement yes you're always going to hit this hard limit which is how much space do you have to remember who's in your good books and who's in your bad books that's right but if we can do that at the challenge if I could be part of a charmer and that chama's good word is now put at risk right now I start to behave because it's my channel right the amount of skill in the game that I have when I represent my Chama when I represent myself as coming from my channel is very high under wedged between the people you're doing business with and the people that you're representing that's right with theoretically causes Street deals yes so really The Hope here is you basically engineer a transition from a low trust Society to a high trust Society using crypto yes which would presume would be double the economic efficiency of the economy or something crazy it would it would add percentage points to the economy just like empire did yeah empathy did that because it was a lot it enabled one leg of the chain the trade to move reliably and seamlessly from person to person before before impair so what would happen is you'd take an envelope stick cash in IT hand it to a driver of a tattoo dry the Matata would drive half an hour an hour or even 10 hours sometimes you can get to the other end hand the envelope to a tuk-talk a bike guy yeah he would take it the next leg to the supplier kindness by post cash by post well cash no cash by informal [17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no5RF91vtSQ&t=1050s) Network informed transport network not even by post wow so it was unreliable and you can imagine the uh the arguments that would happen when it disappeared or didn't get there et cetera Etc now the only reason it worked it turns out oh so so we are told you know I had they correct us on this but the only reason it worked was because that the Matata is are owned by chammers oh there you go and the matato driver was now representing the chamber in carrying the envelope so the child Supply always being yes the fundamental trust structure yes so taking existing social structures yes reinforcing the existing local social structures with crypto yes so that the internal credentials can be used externally yes that's the solution so let me run over that again because that's very complex new thinking yes I think a lot of people watching this will just be like what did you say yeah so informal trust structures at about a 30 person scale which are already handling funds on behalf of their members so in a sense they are like a regulated Financial body would be here but they're being warranted by their Community rather than be awarded by their state yes yes so you've assisted a financial agency this person is the financial agent of this other therapy people yes they must be here if we will be righteously or not yes then that structure traditionally not that fungible because if you don't know those people already you don't know whether you know Fred is actually from that trauma or not because the child doesn't have an easy way of extended credentials exactly so you are the digital credentialing system which takes the pre-existing trust structure yes and makes it easy to extend the trust in a geographical sense yes right right right so that then enables it enables Commerce in the sense that you can now safely deal with a Chama on the other side of the country so without having met them before you an advantage you can trade with people that are less like you but yes you've got more Advantage from trade yes you've got tons and tons and tons of rice they've got tons of tons of wheat because of the other end of the country whereas all your neighbors are also growing rice that's right so further we the further people are across the social graph the more likely is the trade will be commercially useful yes --- End of [780] Vinay Gupta and Ian Grigg Speak On Arbitration and Identity in Chamas, Informal Cooperatives. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [567](https://guptaoption.com/texts/567.md) The Fourth Mattereum Physical Asset NFT Meetup 8th Feb 2023 (2023); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.