# COP26 Event: The Circular Economy - Finance and Data for an Abundant Regenerative Future. (part 2 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [793], part 2 of 3. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2021-11-22 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA. 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): Rich data capitalism applied to durable second-hand goods, the spiral economy.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Biomimicry database (2003): Technical lead on the Rocky Mountain Institute era biomimicry database.
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things.
  - Spiral economy (2023): Economic idea: keep goods whole and route them down through tighter budgets.
  - 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)
  - 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:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy.
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products.
  - 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)
  - 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)
  - 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)
- Ideas whose earliest source in this archive is this one: Spiral economy
- Ideas developed here: 30-year plan (Hexayurt; target revised upward, now 300 million)
- Topics: Other speakers / contributors — searchable, not Vinay voice (30%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (16%); Capitalism, consumption & resources (14%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: circular economy (30 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); product information (8 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2019, 2 undated); product information market (4 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2020); second-hand (6 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); right to know (3 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); commodities (8 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); carbon offset (2 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); warranties (5 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2017, 2 undated); doubt discount (2 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2020); Mattereum (13 here; 127 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): spiral economy
- Importance: core-text score 0.66 (1.00 is the top), number 32 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): same career work: The Future of Stuff
  - [702] [Conversation With Pat Kane & Vinay Gupta (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/702.md): same career work: Spiral economy
- On the same works, just before: [773] [Vinay Gupta — Incentive-based epistemology | Ideamarket... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/773.md); [717] [The Novum Insightful - Ep1: Vinay Gupta | CEO of Mattereum (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/717.md); [762] [MetaGame meets Vinay Gupta (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/762.md)
- On the same works, just after: [714] [Autonomous A1 - Taming Capitalism with Vinay Gupta of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/714.md); [702] [Conversation With Pat Kane & Vinay Gupta (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/702.md); [778] [Vinay Gupta on the Future of the Metaverse (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/778.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: The Circular Economy - Finance and Data for an Abundant Regenerative Future., video, 2021-11-22, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [793], https://guptaoption.com/texts/793.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 3
[1:11:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=4306s) this over to our conversation and why don't we start with any questions from the live stream for those of you out in the vast energy consuming internet and here in our beautiful room at the ice hub any questions please and if you could just say your name and who you're with um thank you i should have done that i'll start again my name is julia hales i wrote the original green consumer guide with john elkington in 1988 and many other many other things besides that very much working at the moment in the circular economy and energy issues um but i wanted to ask um uh vinay about the um about the quality of products because obviously the the whole sort of principle of looking at the circular economy relies on products that are actually do have a secondhand value and so many products today are actually made with zero durability if you take a printer it's completely and utterly designed not to last because they make more money by selling more printers and the whole concept of what they're doing um is extremely poor i mean you talked about amazon chucking away their products i did some work with b and q i was absolutely shocked to discover that they actually build in at least 10 percent of their products being returned sometimes with no faults at all and they just bin them because they have no possibility of repairing them no possibility of resale selling them in there and it's absolutely shocking um we also have that in in in fashion obviously people burning the clothes because uh they don't want people to have a secondhand value so there's lots of things within that which means that um that we cannot simply build it into a circular economy world because they can't be reused or disassembled or whatever so i'd just like to have i think about that and i have one further small point which is it's interesting at the beginning of our sort of green consumer campaign and eco labeling life cycle assessment all those type of things that commodities were actually the biggest problem because people would say to us how can we possibly have traceability because it goes back into the commodity supply chain and we have no information that we can give you because it's all very generic but what from what you were saying in

[1:14:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=4456s) some ways that has turned completely upside down by actually coming about the commodities are much easier to track than many other things so i was rather interested in in that point so um the um the crux of this is we have to think very carefully about how we got into the mess we're in right now and the answer is in the old days you know the sort of paradigm of retail was you walked into the shop you bought it and you left and that was all there was right then we got into this thing where we had things like catalog shopping and you know that began to change things then we moved on to the internet so you could see what the object was on the internet you could buy it and so we've seen gradual intrusion of i.t further and further and further in um and over the last sort of 50 years we've had three dramatic insertions of what you would think of as being information technology and statistical reasoning into commerce so the first one is the quality control revolution which happens when statistical process control really blossoms in japan under the care of a guy called deming um then you've got the quantitative finance revolution in the 1980s and then you've targeted advertising so what we've done is we've basically applied massive big data statistical reasoning modeling approaches in investment in manufacturing and in sales the next step is we start applying those things to product use which you can see a little bit with you know your phones and your watches and all these devices that have enough brains on board to know how they're being used the next step is then product reuse resale disposal what's happening is we're just pushing the iot infrastructure you know a step at a time towards the garbage dump and eventually you get to the point where the goods have been tagged like if one of your bottles winds up in the garbage there's a decent chance that at some point there will be a machine that will just take pictures of everything as it goes by on a conveyor belt pick out the thing that actually has an owner and then ship it back to them hey one of your reusable bottles was in the garbage we've got like 500 of them will ship you you know like once every six weeks or send a truck so it's it's a temporary condition that we have this waste stream right and i think that if we are careful about this what you will see is a fight to quality right the fact that we're in a general economic decline in the west you know america and europe are getting poorer

[1:16:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=4606s) rather than richer there's a lot of wealth concentration you know people are rapidly becoming too poor to buy garbage right what they want is durable things that will last you get bored with the durable things you sell them you take the money you buy somebody else's durable things as long as the goods are sufficiently durable as long as there's good liquidity you can change your look 12 times a year and you're really only just you know you have the same footprint as if you'd use it you're wearing the same clothes because it's just durable goods being rotated around those people and that as a process you know the one of the reasons i got very excited about this whole thing was it was the first time in years i'd seen an environmental innovation that could produce both higher quality of life and lower footprint simultaneously you know if you had access to all of the clothes in glasgow that people didn't want to wear anymore and you knew exactly what size they were you know you get up in the morning you decide you want a new outfit you feel like wearing a ridiculous purple and green thing and immediately you know there you are dressed like a frog you know wow okay that was amazing you do it for three days you get bored you sell the clothes on somebody else tries the experiment it's not that we're going to have less consumer choice in this paradigm what happens is you get dramatically more consumer choice and the consumers that are in the circular paradigm have more money because they're wearing better clothes and they're paying less for them i think really the take make waste cycle the kind of fast fashion stuff i think it's going to get driven out by this combination of poverty and computers sorry that was kind of a long answer did that cover the stuff you wanted to know okay good good good thank you do you have another question so i thought i might go next just because i'm right here um so i'm actually julia's son my name is monty um i'm currently doing a masters at bristol university um but i'm also setting up a business called people power and we want to be the internet of impact finance and one of the areas particular areas we're focusing on is this hugely exciting area of um impact cryptocurrency which i'm very excited to hear that there's two new projects for us to potentially integrate into our platform um and yes i'd love to love to reach out reach out to you guys afterwards but my question was uh for Mattereum in particular uh which was do you have a plan for a token sale and if so um what what will this token will it be a utility token security token what will its function be and some maybe some governance implications there as well yes so um one of our kind of partner companies uh

[1:19:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=4756s) just is in the process of acquiring the gibraltar stock market now you may say why would a crypto company acquire a stock market and the answer is because you can then do securitization of assets so you take a house you take a car you take a fleet of cars you fractionalize ownership and you can then float these kind of assets it's probably going to be a year or so before they get through the regulatory to get that fully up and running but maybe pilots in six months so in terms of tokens we are extremely conservative right uh i got legal advice in 2016 um which is one of the reasons that i'm not worth a hundred million dollars because of the DAO crisis i was holding a lot of ether i got legal advice and they were just like you know if that turns out to be a security you're currently promoting an unregistered security and profiting from insider trading like you're in real trouble kit so i divested and to this day i remain a no coiner um in all probability there will be a Mattereum token it will be a relatively simple thing which is used by people that are for example dealers and it will offset their fees you know every time something goes around this system Mattereum takes a small fee basically would be doing pre-sale of services i say that with some caution this is still a process which is sitting legal it's a relatively conservative plan in fact for the most part we're vc funded and we intend to remain vc funded but in the crypto markets as they currently stand if you don't have a token there is no way for your fans to monetize promoting the thing that you're providing so for us if we want to have 100 000 rabid fans who are pushing the circular economy every time they talk every time they build something every time they buy we have to provide a way for those people to get involved and you know at this point that means tokens it'd be nice if we had real regulatory clarity about that and i keep hoping that the uk government will take a lead on this because you know with the city's infrastructure you can imagine that they could be a globally dominant force in this next generation of finance that requires giving the city of london the ability to really seriously define black and white rules about how things work and then implement those rules so in short yes but with a lot more caveats that you'd expect from a crypto company thank you um one of the things that we've been talking a lot about uh in inside of hub culture is the creation of a dvl we call it a digital value layer and the premise is that everything eventually

[1:21:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=4906s) every object will have a digital value layer and the crypto markets which did go from i was shocked to hear that one point x trillion is the size of the internet when the crypto markets this year passed a trillion themselves and it briefly hit two trillion to to think that to think that the crypto markets were worth as much as the entire internet times two that was a real revelation but i'm curious because greg you have so much experience working in this world like your time at bmw your time working with boring company and with these kind of material areas of the economy are you guys thinking um about this digital value layer concept as you look at investments because you're looking at real estate but are you seeing this value layer emerge across the physical economy uh yeah i'll say we do see it as a as an aspect here but at the at the sort of end of the day it's kind of like a uh it's an unlock but only an unlock for the underlying sort of science right so what we're typically investing in is is things that are uh you know for example clean concrete right like at the end of the day if you do not have the clean concrete you can't put a digital value layer on top of it and you know then trade the carbon credits or whatever it is that you're gonna you know uh monetize with that uh with that value layer so to us it's uh it's cream on the top of some underlying core scientific breakthrough that actually allows the the ultimate sort of uh carbon uh solution right so your clean steel technology or your clean concrete or your high efficiency hvac system or whatever it happens to be so we definitely do see these as ways to sort of juice returns because typically what is uh if you look at any technology when the buyer of that technology let's just use a user a real example here uh we're investors in a company called turn tide motors their motors are 30 to 60 more efficient in the real world they go into the air conditioning systems inside buildings sounds super boring it turns out that half of the world's electricity goes through motors like these um it's a hundred billion dollar market just for the motors they consume about a trillion dollars of electricity every single year so like super boring actually moves the needle if you've got a motor that's 50 more efficient on average um so there we would uh the buyer looks at that and says okay i can get value out

[1:24:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=5056s) of this motor either from cost savings from the electricity or maybe i'm going to go and prove with some digital value layer that i have cut my electricity usage therefore my co2 has come down and therefore i'm going to get some value out of say a carbon offset market right and that way because now you've got two layers of value for the buyer there they're getting savings on their electricity and they're getting this other digital value whatever it happens to be now you can take a technology that maybe was a three-year cost payback and turn it into a one-year cost payback right and then um the great thing about capital expenses that are like a one-year cost payback is you can sell those to a cfo at a company who is an active climate change denier and he will still want to buy them right so uh long story short it's cream on the top but it's a it's a very valuable cream to to help these products get to market uh let's go back here would you mind to pass the mic back oh there we go zenya oh thank you very much for this question so far i have a question on an around innovation and standards uh you know you talked a lot about standards in the commodity market is one of the things that are facilitating the second-hand market especially and also in a circular economy again we can all see the more standards we have the easier it will be to have a secondhand market and and sort of reuse stuff uh i guess also with re and like bottles and to get full adoptions and so forth but uh but could you elaborate a little bit more on your thoughts around how that interacts with innovations because standard also prevents innovation people deciding what the standard should be shouldn't be monopoly power again how that will sort of work in in a capitalist world where yeah yeah i mean welcome to my next 15 years right i mean that's what i'm expecting to spend a huge amount of my time doing uh in the next phase of this so um right so once upon a time there was a thing called wsgi web services gateway initiative goes gateways so wsgi was this model of building a kind of data layer that you could interrogate to find out what goods and services other people sold so you'd go to you know ibm.com wsgi gateway and then i could say right so give me an ontology of everything that you sell that i might be

[1:26:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=5206s) able to use and you could search their offerings and there'd be apis for everything and it was a sort of platonic ideal of machine to machine trade and i think it was real popular for about three years then everybody decided it was impossible and gave up the platonic approach where we build standards in a top-down way is also very enshrined in ideas like object-oriented programming it's deep inside of sql databases there's something called seeing like a state which is i want to say by scott maybe which really gives you a great summary a great model of how that sort of top-down platonic ontological approach works standards that come from that approach tend not to work in the real world because the real world is it just doesn't grow from a platonic tree there is no sort of blueprint in the causal plane from which physical world is rendered it just isn't that way on the other side you've got things like folksonomy and foxonomy was a sort of approach that gave us things like hashtags where you have a community of people that want to communicate something and in a sort of semiotic way they find a symbol like hash yolo friday and they give harsh yellow friday a meaning which is only inside of their little semantic bubble and then when we try and get information between those semantic bubbles we have to have translators so the folksonomies work but they don't work globally and it creates again a meaning crisis sits um ontologically in a different camp so our approach is very much modeled around aspect-oriented programming and i'm trying to remember the name of there's a philosopher who's done a whole bunch of work on this um and the name is completely escaping me i talked to him not two months ago i've tried to remember the name i'll post something in show notes so the aspect-oriented programming model basically suggests that for a single physical entity you can have different um sort of social groups with different folksonomies that will categorize the same object relative to their perception of it so we take a single physical object 4 5 10 25 different groups are interested in that object each one of them brings their own ontology and maps it to it and what we record in the blockchain is person a uses ontology b to describe thing c and that relationship because it accepts that the object has multiple

[1:29:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=5356s) ontological standings inside of different groups gives us the ability to do innovation so we have an object it's in the standard ontology it's got the following fields and the definitions it meets the standard somebody comes along and says i have a new ontology i'm going to place that object in the new ontology and it becomes one in a chorus of voices each one of each of them is looking at the object from their own perspective and by putting the perceiver into the system as a first-class actor it gets us into position where we can accept that innovators use a different way of looking at the world than everybody else and if they define ontologies which are um value representing then more people use those ontologies we wind up with here's the standard model here's the new model here's the really new model here's the bleeding edge model multiple different ontological representations attached to the same object and when something is being bought and sold if you require a financial compensation if the ontological representation is wrong you know if the descriptor is wrong the standard is wrong then those people are getting paid for making the data available in that format in that ontology and as a result they could get income from creating ontologies to represent valuable aspect attributes of objects so in short it's an evolutionary approach to ontology development but uh maybe in in um i see it in the digital perspective and from data but like just adapters for power in the uk versus others you know the iphone and all of these type of things so so you also see it applicable there that you will not sort of hinder too much of the innovation that we need to to come up with the new solutions absolutely i mean being able to correctly describe things is very very very helpful right like hey i got these chargers in my travel bag do i need to buy anything before i go on this trip if i'm taking this new camera just to have a thing which will reliably answer those kind of questions really helps because it tells you whether your equipment will work and it tells you if you have to buy something or not we don't expect there to be much influence from what we're doing on that kind of standardization because my expectation is that the european union is going to become the globally dominant actor in setting those kind of technical physical connector standards i think eu is just going to throw its way around and force that stuff up here in the front up yeah i'll i'll give you mine what's your um name everyone my name is zoe i work for a climate sex tech startup called um

[1:31:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=5506s) altruistic and we look at essentially helping large companies with their carbon management and sustainability management um thank you everyone that was a really interesting conversation i loved hearing about all the technological innovations and the coins and as well as i think some of the new startups that are coming about looking at refillable bottles one of the things i wanted to ask about and this is directed towards matt is obviously to be able to engage in this transition towards a circular economy one of the largest things we need to do is help large corporations engage in that transition um with for example you mentioned that you worked with a large retailer what have been some of the solutions that you found have worked with large retailers and with large corporations and getting them to transition and how can that work in conjunction with some of these technological innovations that we're seeing so um just just be sure i actually work for a large retailer it's a chief sustainability officer at walmart okay so um it's a great question so thank you um we when i was at walmart the opportunity we had was to really convene different groups so that we could work on specific areas to move kind of move forward and so i'll give one example we did a lot of work on packaging not only to create better packaging but also to figure out what to do with the packaging after it was used and we actually turned packaging into a very large monetary income for for walmart in the selling of corrugate and other materials but it took a lot of work from the suppliers but before that there are material producers as well as the packaging manufacturers so i mentioned earlier about putting the system in the room it was if you were working with let's say a manufacturer or you're working with a packaging manufacturer or a retailer i would understand where the biggest opportunity was for innovation who needs to be involved in that conversation but i think we are all driven by the financials of it and if it's not doesn't make financial sense and it doesn't work for the customer usually it's life is pretty short and so that's the opportunity i would say you have is how do you understand the basic problem what's the solution but who

[1:34:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=5656s) needs to be involved in in the process because i think too often we do one offs or two offs whereas you really need to get the system working together hope to answer your question great great thank you hi yes i have a mike here i'm catherine chen from axe the moonshot factory uh thank you so much for all your presentations super interesting i have a question for you stan actually um because one thing that i was working on in my past life was you know talking about uh money and financial incentives is a powerful motivator i mean one of the big issues with the current status that we're in is that uh environmental issues are negative externalities and they are not incorporated into the financial system so something like then o2 is super interesting i guess one issue with offsets is uh you know oftentimes they're issues with leakage we're not able to capture the entire jurisdiction i think really to really embed everything we need a global uh currency so question is i guess how is ben o2 kind of thinking about that to be comprehensive and also be um you know start with forests but maybe move on to other sectors eventually maybe uh real estate as well something which is deeply embedded in all the materials going in there thank you i love that question and it demonstrates a pretty deep understanding of the sector these are issues that we've wrestled with a lot so i would say there are three main components to my coming answer one is there's negative externalities but there's also positive externalities and so what's really interesting to this um is that oxygen is a positive externality that we're not even thinking about and so that's kind of interesting it's also a positive externality that's global and so the reason we make one vo2 equal to one ton of oxygen is that you can roughly calculate now our algorithm and our ai we would love to work with x by the way to improve the intelligence of the ai so that it could get more granulated um but the ai and as you understand how ai's work it's really a collection of data points and information and apis that feed in to a growingly sophisticated algorithm and so at the moment um we have about let's say two dozen factors that feed the ai and the algorithm to calculate the

[1:36:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=5806s) amount of vo2 that a piece of land that is staked to the shared mapping which is by the way a google map interface um calculates the amount of vo2 and so what's interesting about that is that it's fully global so the oxygen tonnage of amazon rainforest we're we're actually giving it an upwaiting for places like the sacred headwaters um or like british columbian old growth rainforest at 1.1 to 1.2 grasslands or wetlands mangroves are weighted at like say 0.7 or 0.8 even deserts but which are wild wild deserts or at like 0.3 or 0.4 i don't remember the exact numbers but this is just an arbitrary thing that we created but we wanted to up weight areas where um you know old growth or real wilderness could be benefiting in excess um a monoculture forest that's like regrowth is i think weighted at like 0.5 or 0.6 it's still producing actually the same amount of oxygen but the ai is choosing to up weight certain things from a more um uh you know objective less objective point of view than just the o2 but the key value of o2 is weighted to oxygen tonnage and that's fully global um the other thing that i think is super important for this and we've learned this with venn bitcoin one because it's open source and it won because it's distributed then quite frankly hasn't won because it's not open source and it's asset-backed and so we're not doing either of those things with this project vo2 is fully open source we're putting everything into a public github repository and we're inviting everybody to innovate on that although we are setting some standards about that creation the other thing is vo2 is not asset-backed the value is zero as we begin to to execute but as we learned with dogecoin i bought dogecoin in 2014. we just turned our dogecoin into an environmental estate um in hawaii that we're doing a regenerative farm and and a ceo meditation center we we put the down payment from our profits from dogecoin and so i i'm kind of inspired by what doge has done even though it's been a joke memecoin that elon has thank you elon for our estate in hawaii um but

[1:39:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=5956s) you know the idea is that it started at zero and it grew in value because the community believed in it and i hope that will happen with vo2 open source everybody can participate it doesn't need to be a global currency because i think there are lots of global currencies that now exist and that can exist for different reasons we don't have to be everything to everything we just want to be everything for nature and trees we want to honor and value the work that nature is doing as a positive externality and then the final thing is compatibility and so what didn't exist 10 years ago when we launched venn was anything approaching a market the only market for van was hub culture our social network in our community today it's a two trillion dollar market and the main thing for us is to work with people like Mattereum to build that validation layer for some intelligence and then to work with people like chia i can't really say but we will have an announcement with chia coming on the 10th um you can maybe guess what that might be but also things like bitcoin lightning we think then on lightning which is by the way this thing that makes bitcoin a little bit better um we could turn bitcoin carbon neutral just by putting vo2 on lightning and then letting miners buy vo2 at very low value and have the oxygen like you know externality attached to the bitcoin if you attached vo2 as a wrapper like v btc you could actually have green bitcoin and that would be coming from the oxygen side of the positive externality that we're evaluating does that help get next door next door hi everyone i'm thomas guest um from new york and i'm starting a new organization structured as an innovation lab at the intersection of innovation and justice so i think my question revolves around the concept of innovation i think we're all here because we believe in it but there's also an assumption that innovation drives everyone forward and that will trickle down into smaller indigenous local communities i'm curious with system changes like this which are very exciting what a strategy looks like to actually get this in the hands of a local maybe indigenous community that doesn't have access to the internet or has different access to some of the

[1:41:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=6106s) resources that we do in new york or in glasgow i think the second part of my question also angles towards the future of the physical components of blockchain and we've talked about where this is going from the physical mining standpoint um you know tracking transparency around data for these offsets is a great start but i'm also curious where you see this going from literally a physical resource vision as well into the future sure um so let me take the second question first the avalanche chain is very typical of the third generation trains um about 70 tons of carbon is their best estimate for how much they're actually burning per year which is you know about what you would expect from an american middle class family you know i i don't want to say it's nothing but it's negligible in the grand scheme of things compared to bitcoin which is cranking out something like 23 million tons of carbon a year offsetting bitcoin i did the back of the envelope and it came to like a billion dollar year spent and the bitcoiners will protest that it's all being done with hydro but then you've got to say well that electricity would be doing something else and that you know at the end of the day your computational radiators are bad so i don't think five ten years from now there's going to be any real distinction in terms of energy footprint between blockchain and cloud and apple has pioneered this approach of trying to make chips as efficient as possible for thermal reasons and for battery reasons that will feed back into servers i expect the actual computational you know energy consumption to come down rather than up over time the first question uh here i have to put on my other hat so i mentioned at the beginning this hexayurt project a 30-year plan for rehousing hundreds of millions of climate refugees on the assumption that the world is going to do no preparation at all and that what we need is a stack of really heavy weight ready to scale systems so that when it becomes apparent we have to re-house 100 million people in a year and a half we can do it and i'm 20 years into that i've been chipping away the shelter was about the first five or ten years uh after that came with critical infrastructure modeling language which will allow people to collaborate to design the critical infrastructure systems to provide water heat sanitation uh healthcare you know there's a there's a modeling language a bit like a pattern language for doing that called simple

[1:44:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=6256s) critical infrastructure maps um Mattereum then slots into that vision as being the physical asset handling both for tracking the money when you start talking about spending 20 billion a year doing emergency rehousing but also for tracking the physical assets so if you're in the refugee camp and you need a 10 millimeter wrench to re-secure a satellite dish Mattereum 10 years out want to be so cheap and so universal that if you deploy it in the camps you can track every single physical asset so that you could take a very very light load of things like tools and medical equipment and still provide services for everybody there the thing that i want us to watch out for is this it's very tempting for us to think that the environment is everybody's problem right but in actual fact fifty percent of the human race have basically zero environmental footprint about half of humans grow most of the food that they eat uh unwanted they've been on for generations uh using largely organic techniques they they have some interaction with things like forests or wildlife but for the most part their impact is practically zero then you have the kind of global working class who are burning you know eight ten twelve tons of carbon a year for france the average is maybe five which means half of the people are probably below that and then you have the top 10 of humanity who live in high-rise buildings own suvs and have emissions on the order of 70 or 100 tons per person each and that's really where the impact is it's a few hundred million people with lifestyles which are incredibly lavish and these things are sort of unconsciously aspirational you know before we got here you know we went and we bought a bunch of uh computer equipment so that we would have backup recording and if i could actually see the number of gallons of water that were embodied in that iphone you know we'd need a tub half the size of this room to hold the water and just that thing of like we probably doubled our environmental footprint for a year of operations for the company just by buying a set of hardware to come and film an event that's really where the damage is getting done right um and you know with a little bit of luck those phones will still be in service in 10 years and that's how we will spread the environmental cost but you know we don't have to change the lifestyle of every human being on earth through each sustainability we have to change the lifestyles of on the order of a billion people pretty radically and then we have to start worrying about poverty right because for one you know half of the world's population the problem is

[1:46:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=6406s) not they're doing environmental harm the problem is they don't have enough to eat so you know development on one access and getting rid of the over consumption damage on the other access and my hope is if we get the circular economy thing going um i mean i've been toying with this concept we call spiral economy which everybody hates but just as a nutshell version we continue to run the cornucopia machine as hot as we run it now those goods fall into the first world and then we kind of have the spiral turn so that as the circular economy turns the goods are gradually moved further and further and further away from primary consumption you know first into the second cities then into developing world countries then in developing world villages then into schools and developing world villages so the certain notion that your you know old iphone still has a service life of 15 years and it shows up as a classroom monitor thing in you know some village school in bangladesh in 2034 you know that to me looks like how we're going to solve a lot of the poverty problems because if we you know enforce longevity on the goods as they lose value because innovation makes better things and we value the old things less they get pushed out to the people that have no other access to those kind of goods and it's only when something is obsolete where you know there is something so good and so new that there's no point buying any old version that thing finally winds up being ripped down to raw materials put into recycling um that as a model also fits very nicely with the stuff that you're talking about in terms of a stainless steel based economy you know stainless steel glass these kind of things if you manufacture more and more of your stuff in these essentially permanent materials you get into a paradigm that we call permafracture you make it once you expect it to last two certain two centuries you make it in a standard size like this is a cup you drink out of it it never needs to be touched again and at a certain point you've manufactured all of the stainless steel cups that the world needs and then you don't really need to make any more and we could do enormous amounts of work with permafactor i know if you ever take a look around thrift stores old polyester clothing you can't tell it's old it looks new the only thing that changes is fashion so you can think in cold climates you could have a pool of polyester clothing that would still be working in 30 50 years and that doesn't mean you're not going to be making couture fashion in paris anymore it just means that the couture fashion in paris is going to wind up being used for like you know formal balls at iowa high schools 15 years

[1:49:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=6556s) after it was hot in paris you know we don't need to be throwing stuff away we need to be expecting it to be in use forever and redesigning accordingly and we can design the financial incentives to get us there i i think can i just add something real quick to that um i want to say that back to that digital value layer i think really it all comes down to identity and we need really identity for everything to be able to be circular i don't totally agree with you on that because i think that composability of materials is also good because we're moving forward technologically so a router from 1999 is literally useless to me and most other people yeah this is the hard obsolescence that stuff is just done and i think that's actually a big part of the problem and so we also have to be but here's where i get excited about what they're doing if you have that identity layer it then becomes possible to like rethink what everything is to a more granular composability level focus so eventually the way that things get made will change and that will then drive everything so i i don't even these shoes i i don't really love the look of the shoe but they're vivo barefoots and their ecological sustainable recycled shoes and i'm wearing them because of what they stand for as opposed to what they look like and they're cool i mean they're comfortable it's good for walking around i like them but the point here is that this is a shoe that is like thinking forward it's like additive manufacturing it's fully like vegan and recycled and it's pretty cool and the way that they're manufacturing is changing because they're thinking about circular economy this is a b corp and it's a circular economy shoe and so i'm wearing the shoe because it's those things and i think that what's going to happen is composability is going to become much more important and you really see it with re like this is all about composability you have different brands on the label but the bottle stays the same well what if it happens with like cars right like how do you get to composability within cars where things can go back and as bill says go to reuse but they can go back through the supply chain they can go back to being a commodity cradle to cradle and then come back as another life form right so it doesn't

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/793-3.md (part 3 of 3).
End of [793] COP26 Event: The Circular Economy - Finance and Data for an Abundant Regenerative Future., part 2 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.