# COP26 Event: Green Blockchain, Green Economy (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [791], part 1 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, 2021-11-22 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA. 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): Green-capitalism framing of the contracting layer at COP26.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Sheet-waste question (1995): The question behind the Hexayurt: how to build a dome from 4x8 sheets without wasting 25 to 40 percent of...
  - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (suggested by machine)
  - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine)
  - A Blockchain Solution For Identity? (2017): Keynote to the Dutch Blockchain Coalition (BC3) at Techruption: insurance as the way to make different... (suggested by machine)
  - Internet of Agreements (2017): Paper at the World Government Summit in Dubai on producing legal agreements at industrial scale. (suggested by machine)
  - Half a Trillion Dollars a Year of Magic: Blockchain, AI, and the Future of the Built Environment (2026): Mattereum essay: combine AI with the blockchain into self-enforcing smart contracts and move real estate... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - 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: Other speakers / contributors — searchable, not Vinay voice (42%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (10%); Smart contracts, law & arbitration (10%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: semantic web (7 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); circular economy (10 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); doubt discount (3 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2020); DAO (4 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); COP26 (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2021); legal layer (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); second-hand (2 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); political will (2 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); self-sovereign identity (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); NFT (3 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2019)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): COP26
- Importance: core-text score 0.29 (1.00 is the top), number 266 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [251] [ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/251.md): same career work: Sheet-waste question
  - [752] [Vinay Gupta: The Cities That Will Walk Away (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/752.md): same career work: Sheet-waste question
- On the same works, just before: [733] [Trust models, founding Mattereum, and 'Turning Law into... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/733.md); [768] [#03 - Vinay Gupta : History of Money, Foundations of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/768.md); [717] [The Novum Insightful - Ep1: Vinay Gupta | CEO of Mattereum (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/717.md)
- On the same works, just after: [714] [Autonomous A1 - Taming Capitalism with Vinay Gupta of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/714.md); [678] [WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with Vinay Gupta (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/678.md); [790] ['Mattereum is Blockchain Cypherpunk' (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/790.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: COP26 Event: Green Blockchain, Green Economy, video, 2021-11-22, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [791], https://guptaoption.com/texts/791.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=0s) [Music] [Applause] dear friends uh thank you so much for joining us at this event at this beautiful venue uh Mattereum uh very proud to be working with hub culture to bring you this series of events and this is our last event at cop26 with the title green blockchain green economy uh we are aiming for a zero covered transmission policy at our event so if i may ask everybody to wear a mask you've been provided with these wonderful n95 masks which protect protect the wearer as well as those they have really great data showing the zero transmission for folks who wear them i will introduce our panelists as they as they come up as the as they speak and first we're going to hear from my colleague and my friend vinay gupta the founder and ceo of Mattereum vinay has a very long professional history of working to address emergency situations uh including addressing some of the worse outcomes of climate change he has been

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=150s) working on these issues for several decades and today uh vinay is going to share with us uh the importance of uh carbon neutral blockchains to companies like Mattereum a week ago we were we witnessed the historic announcement that the avalanche blockchain has gone carbon neutral and vinay will now present uh Mattereum's materials view on that in that context cool hi everyone all right [Applause] okay cool all right everyone can we number one

[3:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=203s) okay hi everyone um so let's see do we have uh [Music] okay great fun oh could we have the slides on that screen as well so i can actually see them as i go by otherwise i've got no idea where i am um okay so uh this is going to be a wee bit of a journey uh we've presented this set slides three times and each time there's a slightly different angle this is going to be brutally more technical than the previous talks because this is the one that actually really addresses the blockchain technology underlying and how we're using the blockchain and we're doing some very very radical new stuff which has not been done using blockchains before not in the blockchain layer itself but in the layers above the blockchain the applications which we're writing which are on top of it um so let's get cracking um so my background basically noodling around with technology in the 1990s mostly 3d graphics couple of worlds firsts then after 9 11 12 years in defense security and resilience uh including working directly for the chief information office of the department of defense and the former uk secretary of defense uh and then i had enough of that uh said sold this for game soldiers and went off and joined the ethereum team there i project managed the launch of ethereum and then moved on to start Mattereum specifically as a company to integrate what we call ricardian contracts which are smart contracts which are recognizable in a court as a legal contract so when you move something on the chain a court of law will recognize that you've done that and will correspondingly enforce the contract my colleague anton has done years of work with uk government to get their understanding of this up to the point where they were to change regulation to support that model and we succeeded in that this year with some very very dramatic expansions of what you can do with the blockchain as a result um now the other side of this background is the buckminster 4 thread um can you raise your hands if you know about buckminster 4 you know this guy that's pretty good yes so i'm very much a disciple of foolers i redesigned the geodesic dome so you could manufacture it using nothing but a table saw and a bunch of 4x8 by getting all the trigonometry out and we did that by changing the mathematical basis of the geodesic dome

[5:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=353s) from spherical trigonometry to convex tiling so if you think about what shapes can i make with straight cuts across a four by eight and then watch how can i make those shapes curved what you get is a different class of structures which still approximate domes but can be made on building sites by people without any specialized skills and that design has gone massively viral they build tens of thousands of these things a year for burning man they're being used a second generation system in refugee camps it actually works my saying about this has been if the hippies that had these they would have won um that thread then goes through rocky mountain institute which is where i worked for a good while edit a couple of their books um and then through into the era of bruce sterling's shaping things another massive intellectual influence who now works with us and then finally the cradle to cradle stuff circular economy we're sharing this facility right now um with the mcdonough team including the man himself uh and we're greatly indebted to all these people in terms of the intellectual mulu from which this works this is not the normal intellectual heritage of the blockchain folks the blockchain folks normally draw this diagram and it goes basically straight back to ann rand and if you're lucky it will go back to the scottish enlightenment economists adam smith and those guys so it's the blockchain but it's the blockchain seen through a completely different intellectual lens building from a completely different intellectual base this is why we have so much more traction than the regular blockchain folks um so the goal state is to run the world within the resource limits we have and the radical way of thinking about this is we take the sustainable yield of the earth and we divide it by eight billion and if you do that for carbon um carbon intensity for average spending is about 250 grams per dollar of gdp so if you look at your consumer spending on average for every dollar you spend 250 grams this means that you can spend ideally eight thousand dollars a year and that's everything including things like rent that's kind of sort of what sustainability looks like and by the way to get that to be sustainable you have to move to that standard of living 20 years ago today we've already overshot what is acceptable and we're well into the process where we have to do active reduction of the amount of atmospheric

[8:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=503s) carbon we can't just live sustainably we have to live regeneratively which means getting the carbon out of the atmosphere most of the folks talking environmental stuff don't really make this model quite so damn clear because when you do make it that damn queer your audience tends to freak out and they tend to freak out for very good reasons because this is a terrifying contingency right this is a really really hard outcome um so what we do to get us there is we build on the circular economy model but what we say is rather than having a circular economy where we take the steel or the aluminium and we melt it back and we turn it into products and we go around that long loop what if we have a circular economy which is based on the idea of reuse right somewhere in my pocket i have a phone right and as long as this phone is bought in perfect condition and has a replaceable battery so the battery that's in it is in great condition when i buy it i have very little reason to care whether i'm the first owner of the second or nor the fifth owner right the specification of the phone is unchanged by the number of previous owners so if you imagine a hotel in let's say japan right they could have a stock of phones that are already set up on the japanese phone networks they already have a sim in them i arrive i buy a phone at the front desk i use it for three weeks while i'm in japan i drop it back off at the front desk and the hotel buys it back from me and then they sell it to the next guest in line right those kind of services are displacing production rather than me buying a phone and it's my second phone and i put a local sim in it and then i leave it sitting in my suitcase the rest of the year the phone which does the service in japan is constantly in use in japan and i don't have a second phone because any hotel that i go to i just buy a second phone when i need it use it and then drop it off the desk on the way out that sort of circularity applies to everything clothing furniture consumer electronics transport vehicles all of these things in theory could just go round and round and round and round again and the reason that they don't is economic transactional friction so the rest of this is going to be about getting down into the roots of why blockchain technology is the answer to reducing the economic transactional friction in second-hand markets the point where the circular economy begins to utterly work

[10:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=653s) right so the platform i'm just going to skip over the amount of waste in the world because the numbers are gigantic they're so big you can't even conceive of them um okay so nothing made to be thrown away the critical part nothing to be thrown away is that everything that you buy you buy with the intention of selling again and if you only take one thing away from this imagine in a world where everything you buy you buy with the intention of selling again this gives you total clarity about how the future has to look you can't buy things with the intention of throwing them into landfill you can't buy things with the intention of just dumping them in some charity shop you have to buy it with the intention of selling it and getting the best possible price this changes your behavior in two ways the first thing is you buy things which are high quality so they will last and the second is you preserve accurate information about the condition of things so that when you are selling them again you're selling them with complete information about what the object is so that the next buyer doesn't throw you know doesn't lower the price because they can't get clarity about what they're buying and those two behavioral changes then go back up the process and begin to change what it is that people are actually you know buying and selling and you know just how all of those processes work right here we go okay uh commodities liquidity i'm going to skip the commodities slides for a second and come right to this concept of the doubt discount so this thing that we call the doubt discount is specifically that uncertainty reflected directly in the way that these systems operate right if you have an object and you're trying to buy it and you don't know how much it's worth you don't know what condition it's in you don't trust the available data that you have on it what you're going to do is you're going to discount the price you're going to say actually that's kind of expensive i'm not really sure if it's real or not and this causes a tear between the buyer and the seller and their valuation of the object um if i'm selling an object and i know that it's worth a thousand dollars and i know exactly what condition it's in it's a thousand dollars if you're buying the object and you say well you know i can't really see this thing before i buy it it's being shipped to me in the post i've seen some pictures they're not taken in great light i just wonder how much wear and tear there is you know what if there's a scratch i can't see you say maybe i'm going to offer 800. because you're dropping the price of the object to reflect the uncertainty about

[13:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=803s) the condition you can't get good data you drop the price this means there's no 200 difference between what i know the object to be worth and what you're willing to pay because your information is imperfect this means that we have a collapse of liquidity in secondhand markets because if we can't agree on the price we can't make the transaction happen that 200 dollar gap means i'm only going to accept the 800 dollar bid if i'm desperate and you're gonna only give me a thousand dollars if you're desperate and the result is that you just don't get effective second-hand trade and you know i mean if you think about this how much easier is it for you to buy something than to sell something right how many clicks does it take for you to buy something off amazon maybe three clicks four you know you can say to your amazon alexa thing you know hey alexa buy me two pounds of coffee and it will turn up on your doorstep the next day if i want to resell those two pounds of coffee because it turns out that i don't need them anymore how hard is it right and that asymmetry between the ease of buying and the ease of selling is why the average western consumer has something like 300 000 objects in their house stuff just piles up you get a bunch of cables to plug things into other things you no longer need those cables you know the thing that you originally plugged them into is gone you have no way of reselling the cables you don't want to throw them away you might need them some way somebody worked hard to make that cable and now you have a cable monster and anybody that works in technology has a cable monster in their house nobody will deny this right and if you're a photographer it's the same thing with old lenses right if you're a chef it's you know whatever weird piece of equipment you have hey thomas you know you just wind up with a whole bunch of stuff and there is a mic there that you should clip onto your lapel so all of that kind of accumulation of nonsense um it's clogging up the arteries of civilization in a really severe way and all of it implies massive amounts of new production which isn't helping anybody it's literally destroying the climate for no human gain and that is i think we all agree kind of a bad outcome um so we get rid of this doubt discount with having perfect information and that creates enormous amounts of liquidity in the second hour markets now um just one more word on this this value uncertainty thing much as it hits individuals hard you want to see how

[15:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=953s) hard it hits industry so if i'm buying high specification bolts for an airplane i'm paying say 75 dollars a bolt if i only need 24 bolts but the box comes as 144 trying to get those bolts sold in a way that preserves their value of 75 dollars a bolt is practically impossible because moving the certification along with the bolt is hard right and those kind of asymmetries they're value destroying and they often mean that it's easier to buy a new box of bolts than it is to get the remaining bolts sold and those problems they litter the economy um so we briefly discussed this right consumer to consumer commerce it's much harder to buy than to sell than to buy as a result trade between consumers has never really taken off ebay does a little bit of it but it's nothing like an efficient clearing rail because if it was would you have all this stuff in your house that no longer serves your purposes right and you know what we're looking for here is a kind of marriage between high technology and marie condo so that we can live minimally minimally but we always have what we need and we knew we no longer need it we sell it on for 95 of what we paid for it it becomes like respiration you buy you sell you buy you sell you buy you sell you never have more than you need but you have a constant flow of novelty because frankly humans get bored with having the same stuff all the time you want a new jacket you get a new jacket your old jacket goes out the new jacket isn't actually new you're the fifth person to wear it you don't care you wear it for a season you're bored with it you sell on you buy another new jacket and that one is also fifth hand so you can have a constant churn of stuff in your life without creating more environmental damage as a result of that churn and i think that that potentially is a consumer society that we're much happier with because we've got constant access to goods and services at really low prices particularly goods but it also provides us with a churn which doesn't damage the environment every time we go around that loop it's a much better way for the world to run and we have the technology to implement so here's where the crypto stuff begins the mechanism that we use to implement this is called a trust community and a trust community is a special case of a thing called a dao a decentralized autonomous organization a quick raise of hands who knows what dao is

[18:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=1103s) okay so for the most part a dao is basically a pool of tokens and some decision-making procedures that are all set up on a blockchain those kind of daos have a bunch of astonishingly unfortunate legal kind of hangovers because courts don't really understand that structure and as a result they often think of the dowse as being uh collective investment vehicles or other things which have a bunch of very problematic legal outcomes the way that we think of the DAO in our specific instance is a little different we call them kind of mini daos so you take the object in this case we're going to use my phone and what we have is a bunch of independent third parties of all how to look at this you know i show it to thomas thomas says okay yeah it's in pretty good condition you know you kept it in case it's nice you look at it and say yeah i've just you know factory reset the software as requested i'm going to guarantee the software through factory reset you know you look at it and you see you know check the battery capacity on machine it's all legit anton looks at and says that is indeed the you know iphone whatever it is 11 12 9 14 21 whatever so that process right we've got independent information coming from multiple parties but the thing is identified as the union of all that information so if you think of something like a balloon that's being tethered to the ground by four or five different ropes the value in the object is attached to multiple different people every time another person joins that collective and adds an additional piece of information to it it increases the value of every other piece of information in the system so when you think of a large purchase let's say a hundred million dollar office building you might have 30 or 50 different entities each certifying a different part of the building story this person has inspected all the windows for corrosion this person has looked at the structural engineering reports and certifies that they're current and up to date this person has gone down and done seismic analysis of the area and has come to the conclusion the building's still up to uh code somebody else has gone through an energy tested it to figure out how fast it leaks energy every single one of these pieces of information makes the building more valuable because it reduces buyer uncertainty same thing for the legal status of the building 12 different teams of lawyers go through and make sure that there are not two mortgages on it they make sure that there are no liens there's no pending litigation there are no other legal problems snags problems with title all that's been sorted out it's perfect

[20:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=1253s) so the thing about that arrangement is that every additional person that provides more information makes the existing information worth more if i only have a report on this that says the battery capacity is 85 of what it was when it was new that one piece of information is not enough to sell this phone similarly if i've got all of the other reports but i don't have the battery information that also is not enough to sell this phone you need complete information so what happens is that the other three reports suddenly become dramatically more valuable when the fourth report comes in because now we know the phone we know the software we know the condition and we also know the battery does that sort of make sense it's kind of a technical example but you know i really want to stress that what makes these things like daos is that all the different people who are adding value to that pool are also benefiting directly from it but it doesn't have the enormous legal complexity that comes with the tokenization per se um so that structure actually go back there for a second back there so that structure in the middle right the thing which says assets that's an nft absolutely bug standard erc 721 nfd currently trading on openc polygon what's the other one openc thank you openc on ethereum mainnet and we also have some things on vendley market with polygon uh and probably avalanche coming quite soon talk about the avalanche thing in a second um so anything that's you know if you evm you know compatible ethereum compatible we can do that stuff very very quickly now semi-quickly quickly initially so that notion that we take an nft we couple it with a dow like structure which has multiple independent threads of liability those liabilities are represented as legal contracts and those legal contracts are enforceable because they're structured as ricardian contracts and they run against the uk arbitration rules which we spent years kind of having discussions with the relevant regulators until they made a change to the way that that stuff works so that stack is a very very deep stack it goes right the way down to law and it travels all the way from this deep legal layer through layer by layer by layer by layer by layer by layer by layer

[23:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=1403s) until it's you know it's connected to bang up-to-date brand new blockchain technology like for example the avalanche chain which is now net zero which was the announcement we made earlier this week right so what we talk about in terms of the knowledge graph is the combined total of all the information that we have about these objects that's the thing that really generates the value in the scenario it's our ability to say we understand everything about these objects in depth and we also understand their relationships to each other so will this phone connect to this other piece of equipment you know i mean i had two hours of entertainment this afternoon trying to figure out how to get files between uh this phone and an ssd drive that we had kicking around and you know there were probably four or five different components that were in the loop before we made that work right that's not really work that human beings should be doing i ought to have an index of all the stuff that i have in the bag and i ought to be able to tell a computer i want this and this to work together and i want to go there and figure it out for me now to get that done what's required is some way of representing the knowledge about what these objects are like and how they work together now we don't have slides for this bit because uh basically this is the first time we're really talking about this in public the way that we're getting that done is we're going and we're reviving the ghost of the semantic web ooh the semantic wave anybody remember semantic web yeah yeah you can see people are already going pale in fear so the semantic web was a kind of late 90s early 2000s attempt to organize all of the world's documents and all the world's data using a single common representation and that common representation was called xml right on top of that there were then a bunch of layers that were indexing layers like wsgi right so the sort of idea was you could retrieve information about how services operated like search engines you could then send them formatted queries that would be able to access the deep knowledge inside of those search engines and you could map your way around the internet with intelligent agents that would be able to talk to each other to figure out what the other agent did so instead of your web browser just throwing you web pages your web browser could have structured conversations with other people's data services hey you're an airline right yeah i'm an airline hey here's my calendar could you tell me when i would

[25:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=1553s) be able to fly to seattle reasonably cheaply in the next three months and it should be on a date when i've got at least two friends who are available in seattle to go and see okay we can figure that out so that ability to have everything talk to anything and behave in intelligent ways all of the technology was there 20 years ago what wasn't there was enough of a business model to push up the complexity hill to get to the other side where those services became real this is where our friend the blockchain comes in because if you can figure out a direct monetization strategy for information as a service you can then take that monetization strategy refold it into all of this xml stuff and all the rest of the semantic web concepts because you can now get paid for providing accurate information which is correctly formatted using these xml standards and the ability to get correctly formatted information that is accurate about physical things this is how we solve the cabling problem i want to connect this phone to an ssd every single cable in my bag has an xml file that describes what's on each end of it and the drive describes its power requirements the hub tells us whether it moves the power through the hub all of the little converter doohickeys tell us whether they do power or whether they only do data and if they do power how much power do they do and those interconnected pieces you can use a computer to figure out whether they join together to make a complete data pathway from one device to another or whether you're one connector short and if you're a connector short it can figure out where you can buy one and it can sell it to you at that kind of problem-solving capability it's everywhere around us it's anything technical computers trying to connect to printers car repairs moving into a new house and trying to figure out whether your couch will make it through the door um say that you're somebody that is like cares about clothes do these two colors go together can i have these shoes in green right will this fabric survive dry cleaning all of that stuff that's all data representation questions and if we have that data you wind up in a position where when you throw a bunch of clothes into a bag and send it to your dry cleaner they automatically detect if something in there will be destroyed by dry cleaning it's a way of having computers begin to soak up the complexity of the world that we have made with computers because almost anything in this room that you're looking at apart from the plants

[28:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=1703s) originally existed as a computer model and was manufactured using cad cam you know even the timber that was used to make these tables that stuff was cut using a robot so we have computers for generating complexity but we don't have computers for soaking it back up and making meaning this is the problem that's solved with the semantic web now final section um i'm going to skip that no no actually no i'm not going to skip that so in this right we have a whole set of different structures regarding contracts immutable storage first of all warranties asset passports and so on all the stuff that we're talking about fits into these asset passports that is the place where the data is stored and that's where all this xml stuff goes that's where the semantic web is going to be revived it's going to be revived in the context of describing using data the precise condition of an object which is then being insured with a legal contract so you have the xml file you have the legal contract that gives it force if the file is wrong or the data is wrong or the thing is misdescribed or the information is incomplete if somebody makes a decision using that data they can litigate and they can recover their money and that is how we get the semantic web back um i'm just going to skip that and just very briefly we're going to run over the blockchain avalanche it's the blockchain of choice for this kind of work it's that way because it is now net zero they have taken it carbon neutral it's incredibly fast and incredibly efficient we're very very proud to be working with them um publication on what something is we've just discussed that change of ownership records you get that from nfts very simple very direct we all know how nfts work mostly um guaranteed payments because we've got all these legally binding contracts around if i'm buying a warranty i make a payment on the blockchain as a result i've got proof that i made the payment which means my insurance cover starts automatically this is absolutely critical and then finally dispute resolution we've got all this court machinery in place so we can enforce at the nation-state level because you know that we can enforce at the nation-state level it means that we can then also provide alternatives to litigation where we say you know if we have to enforce this contract the hard way we can but wouldn't you rather we did this the easy way and we've got the machinery for doing that as well right um so final section the system that i've described is live

[30:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=1853s) right now right erc 721's on openc being bought being sold uh that is a half million year old hand axe asset passports containing structured data about objects in these legally binding containers including numbered gold bars and all this stuff is up and running today it's all legally enforceable in 161 countries the assets are in vaults you buy the nft it gives you the right to take the asset out of the vault in the next phase we'll start doing all these services for assets which are not in the vault and at that point we're right out in the real world um oh i should mention the carbon off setting oh come on go back so carbon off setting for this kind of Mattereum the gold bars that we're selling have carbon offsets not only for the issuing of the nfts but also for the original mining of the gold so if we go back to our friend the phone previous owner bought 23 tons of carbon to offset the emissions of the phone they also bought some water offsets and maybe some car some soaking up of toxic chemicals in disposable offsets when i buy the phone i inherit all of those offsets um now let me just wind up here i'm going to skip that for a second right so the goal right is to reboot the circular economy right to basically say right we've got a new set of technology that wasn't available to the people implementing circular economy 20 years ago we're going to plug this stuff right into the circular economy concept hopefully partnering with a lot of the existing actors in circular economy and the result of that will be that we can begin to build a circular economy which works for consumer electronics right a world in which phones are literally used until they break a world in which clothes are worn until they fall apart a world in which furniture goes through a whole bunch of nice homes who take good care of it and then when it's finally mangled by kids it goes straight into student accommodations and lives there for the next 50 years right all of these kinds of models the data layer is there the physical objects are there zipping the data layer and the physical objects together is a mechanical process that we know how to do in a relatively affordable way and the more of it we do the cheaper it gets so this is not a sort of talk about a far-off futuristic model of the world this is we're already doing this for gold bars and fine art and comic books and you know william shatner's personal collection of memorabilia and brick of barack we're already doing it for all of that stuff

[33:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=2003s) now that we have the carbon neutral chain we can stop doing it just for things which are rapidly appreciating assets which were individually carbon offsetting we can now do this for mass manufactured goods using a chain that doesn't require us to do the offsets because the chain itself is offset and it moves the whole process of carbon offsetting from action by action by action to simply the infrastructure is carbon neutral and we can do anything we like on it and that's it that's where i will stop and thank you all very much [Applause] thank you veneer now we have a pre-recorded conversation which uh vinay had with john nachas of avalanche where they discuss in detail how the avalanche blockchain went carbon neutral could we play the video please

[1:22:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=4949s) little bit late but we have about half an hour for questions so uh who would like to start yes do you have a roofing microphone uh yeah there is a yeah yes there is the at the back uh if you could say who you are before you ask your question please thank you uh just there at the front table thank you hi my name is mark um mainly just around to the panel um could you explain what cheer coin is because i did see that they had the logo on um outside and i know they promote themselves like a really green blockchain but i don't really know much about them and i don't could you maybe explain what the difference between them and avalanche is i'm not sure we have that expertise on here but perhaps thomas could take that one um i i can um i haven't studied it in in any depth i have to admit um i will do later um but essentially uh chai coin runs something very similar to a nakamoto consensus uh except that instead of uh burning five pound notes or rather just a lot of electricity it takes the much more environmentally friendly option of just filling up a lot of hard drives so you prove that you are storing a lot of data and that is how you gain weight within the network does anybody have anything to add to that explanation no um okay uh i i hope that was the start of an answer for you but i say i don't think we have that much expertise on the stage in that are there any other questions yes gentlemen there hello my name is uh john miller from maui hawaii modern pacific um we have uh something called wanna pledge so we're basically trying to unite the 22 pacific island countries and territories to basically reach 100 renewable energy um and then of course through that we're using blockchain and smart contracts to help bring them together one of the things we're looking at adding we're trying to add too much at once we're already reached critical mass and we're taking off but one of the things that we really wanted to explore i'd like to know your thoughts about it was you know bitcoin uses a bunch of energy right consumes energy just just to make the coin right to mine it you know what would be the problems if we just went ahead and had the states sponsor a coin between the islands and then use the actual generation of renewable energy to be the mining algorithm that way we figured we're we're controlling you know the mining of it by by the renewable

[1:24:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=5099s) energy source it's clearly obviously not just net zero it'd be net positive we believed and then uh you know the whole other concept there is that um it would increase investors to come into the pacific islands basically building renewable energy plants that would be both um you know renewable energy or let's say bitcoin miners you know making money off of the currency as well as the fact they could make their own investment just on the renewable energy project themselves thank you very much perhaps uh bernard you could you could start yeah absolutely um so you know through tokenization it you can basically reward any kinds of activities right so there's some exciting developments now um in this space you know so to you know make green blockchains in a sense right so i think what then needs to be discussed is how you operationalize these things right so what kind of are what are the eligible actions for that um how do you validate and verify them so these sort of other nitty-gritty details for these kind of things right and perhaps if i may sort of you know offer one more thought on on uh the bitcoin network right i mean i'm not sure if sort of you can green the bitcoin network right because the whole idea is essentially to make it explicitly very hard and very expensive um so for that energy must be expensive right so there will always be a place for bitcoin due to its very decentralized and secure nature but it also is just one network among many right so you know we can think we can start now thinking about other blockchain networks that are greener so you know your thoughts go absolutely in the right direction thank you vinay do you have a view on this sure so um uh yeah i guess let's get out the can opener here so the question is one of sovereignty um sovereignty is a common term in the blockchain when people talk about things like self-sovereign identity some people use the term sovereign transactions uh i think that that is generally a fairly poor use of the word sovereignty within its context but when you're dealing with nation states particularly nation states which are being potentially driven out of existence by the response irresponsibility of our energy production system broadly um the prospect is that they can use their sovereignty to affect global change because one flag is exactly the same as

[1:27:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Agrwe2ABLA&t=5249s) another when it comes to the ability to do things like issue currency so we've seen this recent attempt to turn bitcoin into um legal tender in i want to say is el salvador so you know one state says okay we've declared this is our legal tender you other states don't have the right to override our sovereignty and tell us it isn't and it's recognized now by international treaty that this is our legal tender and you have to recognize it as such in your systems or you're breaking the treaties by which states recognize each other's legal standard now i don't know how that process is going to go and whether they're going to be able to get all the way down that process or not but certainly they're making it very awkward for people that don't want to think of bitcoin as a currency and this changes things like tax status so the ability for you know relatively powerless and use the term very lightweight states to use the system of international treaties in which they are peers big guys to force global change i think there's an enormous amount of room for action there um backing currencies with renewable energy generation is certainly not an unreasonable thing to do but if you have a state why not just back the currency with your sovereignty right um or if you wanted to be really experimental and i'm i'm suggesting this off the cuff um in the event that these states really are washed out the the damages will be enormous and one could potentially tokenize those future damages and then allow people to basically buy the risk that these states will sink as a way of financing work to make sure that they don't right those kinds of things this is the sort of last-ditch situation that a lot of the low-lying island states are in they have very little to lose and aggressive use of their sovereignty and aggressive use of the international system close reading of treaties figuring out what their rights are what they can and can't do i think there is an enormous opportunity for them to you know draw attention to their plight and cause general chaos in a way which will gum up the international works to the point where people pay attention to the problem i think there's a ton of room for this kind of work um and i mean i don't want to be too cold about this but what do they have to lose it's a thought thomas uh what about the technical implications of that question i mean it's i could go on for a long time and i'll try not to because it really depends on

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