# COP26 Event: The Circular Economy - Finance and Data for an Abundant Regenerative Future. (part 1 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [793], part 1 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 1 of 3
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=0s) [Music] [Applause] good morning how are you today you can just give us a muffled yeah my name is stan stoneker i'm with hub culture and the ice hub and i'm very pleased to welcome you here today to those of you on the live stream all around the world good morning from glasgow good evening good afternoon wherever you are i'm so pleased to bring vinay gupta and Mattereum to the ice hub to talk about circularity and blockchain and to talk about some of the technical innovations that are driving change in the world of climate change wouldn't it be great if climate change had another meaning if we were talking about climate change in the sense of we're changing our planet for the better for a better climate we all know the numbers we know the outlook and it's my personal belief that we need rapid change at system level to have any chance of adapting to the realities of ecological climate change so i'm really pleased to bring this panel together and um introduce everybody so we have greg smithes from fifth wall which is a large

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=150s) investment and venture firm focused on climate we have matt kissler who's the president of mcdonough innovation and mdbc which is working on really bleeding at the kind of alpha point the pinpoint of the circular economy the thinking through william mcdonough who is our partner here at the ice hub and this location is a collaboration between mcdonough innovation hub culture and orianna's company re and beauty kitchen orianna is the product manager for re which is actually reinventing packaging we'll talk a little bit about that and how they're creating circular economy packaging for fast-moving consumer goods and then as well vinay gupta who i've known for many years a kind of an inventor a sage a little bit of a jedi and one of the founders of of ethereum was one of the seven people who first developed the technology for that and then left to look at stuff and how we think about stuff in the context of digitization particularly smart contracts and that led to something beyond ethereum called Mattereum so we're going to have that discussion today i think i'm going to hand over now to vinay for a brief minute and then we sort of get into a conversation that i'll help to moderate around circularity and i'll tell you a little bit about van oxygen which is one of our contributions to the circular economy that's launching officially on the 10th so welcome vinay hi everybody um so welcome to the event um the circular economy uh kind of trip for me starts maybe 20 years ago when i was working at rocky mountain institute and that was where i first got exposed to the concepts of circular economy from mbdc there was a close partnership between rocky mountain institute and bdc in those days and that stuff really stuck with me so as i got further into the blockchain there was also this thing of like eventually we're going to get to the point where we can use the blockchain for things which are genuinely important the technology will mature to the point where it's useful and we're at that point today um but i want to hand over to matt really you know frame the circular economy tell the story of how it's changed in over the last 20 years what mbdc after these days and really give the journey up to this point where we're all springing off from so um thank you over to you

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=300s) are you a standard set uh i would start okay

[14:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=870s) all right thank you that was really that's a great place to start um so uh just check where we good yeah we're good okay so what i'm going to talk about today is well we're going to cover a lot of terrain the the basic framework that i'm going to lay out is a data strategy for the circular economy and it's a data strategy that enables a financial strategy so what we're hoping to build here is a kind of infrastructure and financial services harness which will support tens of thousands of circular economy businesses it's a kind of base layer that would be akin to something like visa or swift or maybe something like even wikipedia for products um but also connected to the financial instruments so it would have similarities to you know the kind of global network you have for things like credit card processing um the you know time scales are both immediate in that we're starting today but also long in that we envisage this growing over decades until it becomes the default way of owning goods so with that scope in mind i will begin i'm Vinay gupta ceo Mattereum and here we go so what we're going to be talking about here is four steps uh point three why blockchain um one of the things i'm going to be talking about in a lot more detail is that we've just helped one of our partners avalanche become a net zero chain and we believe it's the first actual net zero blockchain they're offsetting all of their missions for operating the chain so we're finally out of the situation of having to offset every single blockchain transaction we do often for tens of dollars of offsets per transaction because the blockchains are so dirty we finally have a plausibly clean chain uh so just bear that in mind as we're talking about blockchain do put down the pitchforks we have a solution for the carbon problem um and that literally came in yesterday i think you know the public announcements we today you're literally the first people to know so my background i spent my 90s wandering around america riding freight trains and writing flight simulators for the air force i also did some involvement in medical imaging i was a graphics engineer came up with a few worlds firsts after 9 11 i got religion in a serious way like oh i need to go do something about the state of the world went to colorado wound up at rocky mountains to and spent about five years associated with the institute editing books writing software writing papers uh helped the biome mercury guild get the

[17:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=1020s) acid data database together worked on small was profitable and winning the island game which were two very important energy policy books and that was where i got exposed to circular economy and lean and a whole bunch of other thinking about the methodologies um then i wound up a pentagon in a variety of military and civilian think tanks were to be working on resilience worst case scenario planner nukes pandemics uh state failure uh complex systems i used to carry a business card that said i don't get out of bed for less than one percent mortality um it's true that was a that was a phase that was the thing that i did around that time i also invented a refugee shelter called the hexayurt which was intended as an open source shelter that we could be constructed hundreds of millions of units so that we could stand for some way of catching the anticipated climate refugees and i expected that project to take 30 years to reach scale based on the study that i'd done of other things that had that kind of historical profile so um we're now 20 years into that project there's one commercial version which is being used in refugee camps there are tens of thousands of people that know how to build them and they're popping up in the states in uh homeless encampments that are about a dozen commercial companies doing small run manufacture hexayurt it's quite a it's a it's another thing uh and Mattereum um i was the project manager for the launch so i think i was about employee 30 i came a little after the gang of seven got together gang of eight um but i was very very involved in setting the paradigms for that project so that's a bit about the roots and i hope that explains how we're working so um oh i've just covered this yeah the deep influences i want to point to um shaping things by our colleague bruce sterling uh bruce is a science fiction writer and he's a remarkable thinker he wrote this book shaping things about 15 years ago and it's a total inspiration for everything that we do it covers a model of how we break down the physical and digital interface so that when products are in the field data about product use is continually folded back and iterated into the next edition of the product so it's a way of thinking about upgrading reality you know if your couch happens to have a cushion which always slides off that information goes back into the system and the next edition of that couch will not have a cushion that slips it's like qa for the entire world and many other things okay so

[19:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=1170s) uh concept of circular economy circularity can happen either in loops that are very close to the consumer or loops that are very far from the consumer so if you imagine something like um a plastic you could have a thermoplastic which can be melted back and cast into new products you could do this with glass but to get there you have to collect it as opposed to consumer waste ship it back to wherever it's going to be reprocessed turn it back into whatever you're going to turn it back into and then you have to reship it you know you pay the cost of manufacturing you pay the cost of shipping that's both energy and money um and then it comes back to the consumer so that approach is the sort of longest arc of circularity um if you come in much closer you can imagine a situation where the circular economy is you have a thing that you're using you're done with it you sell it to your next door neighbor and now they're using it instead of you we still have a circle the thing is still going from user to user it's going around a loop but the loop is now literally you walk 12 feet across a corridor and give somebody a laptop and what we're focused on is very much this idea of the short loop circular economy this is the thing where we keep the goods in their manufactured forms and they go round and round and round and round and you think doesn't that sound like ebay or thrift stores the answer is yes the idea is to upgrade the infrastructure for second-hand markets to the point where the second-hand markets become a highly effective redistribution system for physical goods so that when anything does become uh you know no longer useful to the person that currently owns it we immediately catch it and give it to somebody else that does want it and they pay you for that privilege that loop just getting that right how much stuff that has potential future users is currently winding up in permanent storage or landfill and you know the answer is it's a lot uh let's see let me just skip here we are right here if you've excited about that um so you know the numbers are just staggering right i mean the numbers are so large that it's very difficult to think about the numbers but i mean if you work in tech do you have that kind of couple of boxes of old laptops somewhere in your house you know that thing with all the electronic waste that you've generated over the past 15 years that you haven't figured out how to get rid of for software engineers this is ubiquitous like we tell stories about our boxes of old gear and all of that stuff is potentially usable to somebody but there's no good way of getting rid of it

[22:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=1320s) you know it's a ubiquitous problem you know how big these waste flows are in your own life the clothes you no longer wear that pile up you know and it it exists not just as garbage it exists as the stuff which is in your house that you're not using that is just costing you time and money to maintain right it's the dead closet problem oh i never wear this i should get rid of it well i'll do that later and it goes back in because the energy required to get rid of it and recover the value in it is just so large that it's easier to leave it in permanent storage and this is hundreds of millions of tons tens of trillions of dollars of materials it's crazy so the crux of this is imagine a world in which every single thing that you buy you buy with the intention that you're going to sell again this is the critical transition point this is where the action is so if i buy something with no clear disposal plan it goes one of two places it goes in the garbage or it sits in my house's clutter right um the point where you buy someone think you know one day i'm gonna sell this on ebay rare the point where you buy something and think one day i'm going to you know throw this into a charity shop rare those are kind of gutter ball positions we don't plan for an asset to go into ebay or into a thrift store we plan nothing at all we just buy the thing and we figure out how to get rid of it later so imagine a world where when you buy something you have an explicit plan for getting rid of it baked right into the purchasing of the object right this is the critical plan that is you know like that's really how it works so there are markets which kind of work this way already and these are the global commodity markets global commodity markets you know if you happen to have 100 tons of nice looking steel beams you know sitting in a scrap yard somewhere there is a way of getting rid of that if you have hundreds of millions of tonnes of aluminium coming out of a set of mines there is no problem turning that stuff into commodities and getting it moved around in markets all of that infrastructure works fantastically well and as a result there is no shortage of materials which are in these kind of loops right this is a thing that we know how to do it's happening already at vast scale and the trick of this uh is that the commodities oops sorry one site we've earned the trick of this is that the commodities markets rest on massive clear knowledge about the commodities which are being bought and

[24:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=1470s) sold there's no ambiguity about what you're buying and selling in a commodities market it is nailed down what it is it's being purchased by huge documentation which goes along with those commodities that's why they're able to achieve such tight performance in those markets and the problem that we have for things which are not tightly specified is there the hemorrhage value and we talk about this in terms of the doubt discount when you're buying something secondhand or you're buying something after it's gone through one or more loops your question is how do i know that this is the good one how do i know that this is legit is this the real goods or is it's not the real goods and that don't discount reduces what you're willing to pay for the object right some of that reduction is rational like there's an actual risk you're not really sure what you're buying some of that reduction is irrational you're just not sure you can't be bothered it's this kind of psychological friction some of it is also active fraud there are people out there who are selling fake second-hand things and you know you you don't want to buy a second-hand thing because you don't want to be the victim of fraud so closing up that doubt discount is a question of getting trustworthy information about physical objects and that is the essence of what we're selling right we've got a mechanism for getting trustworthy information about physical objects not by solving the problem ourselves but by establishing a market structure which creates a market for that information we call this a product information market so you know you have some widget some set of people that know about these things are correctly financially incentivized to tell you the truth about this and that exists as a service to match buyers and sellers so think of a multi-party deal one buyer one seller two three four independent experts the independent experts are correctly tied together into a financial structure which allows us to actually purchase the object using their expertise instead of our own because those experts know more about the asset than either the buyer or the seller um okay um i think we covered that there we are and you know the size of this i mean it's right there right trillions of dollars of uncertainty about what things are worth and what their providence is a good example is wine wine is about 400 billion of transactions a year and the estimate is that fraud is minimally 10 of that market globally and at the high end it's as much as 30 and that's not untypical for those kind of collectible or fine art objects

[27:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=1620s) um so another thing that goes along with the ability to get really good information is the thing that we call parametric search so parametric searches if i buy a pair of shoes will they fit right the size of my foot is a parameter and i'm just measuring you know the shoe which is in the store against my foot right now for the most part you do that by going into the store and trying on shoes if you buy them online what do you reckon 20 error rate for shoe sizing online 30 if you buy shoes online how much worry do you have when you buy shoes online that they will arrive and they won't fit right now that's not because we don't know how big the shoe is it came off a cad cam system just like everything else and it's not like we don't know how big your foot is you know you can have a tape measure you can take pictures of it with a fancy phone and it will immediately give you a very clear size of your foot so why can't we match the online shoe to the foot with zero percent failure because every time we send out goods if they're not the right size they go back cost inconvenience footprint and it turns out that brands like amazon or infrastructure like amazon and what comes back into amazon they don't bother reselling they just throw throwing a landfill and that's a real problem that's that is not how the world should operate there should be no situation where something winds up in a landfill just because we didn't know what it was you see what i mean about how that sort of sounds absurd in the age of the internet the idea that we're landfilling things just because we can't identify them like what is all this artificial intelligence for anyway that right so the way that we solve that problem um is this structure that we call trust community now trust community is a social way of thinking about something which is actually a whole mess of very complex legal contracts arbitration clauses international arbitration options you know there's a lot of infrastructure that goes into building something that looks this way so the notion of a trust community is another way of thinking about this thing we call a product information market um i have an object right i don't know what this is i got some idea you know it's a recording doohickey if i'm selling this thing secondhand because we got a different one what do i do with this well i try and describe what it is but i'm not an expert in recording devices you want to buy it but you just want to

[29:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=1770s) solve your problem you're not an expert in recording devices where do we inject the knowledge into the deal that allows us to do the transaction safely and the answer is somebody who knows about audio gear takes a look at it oh this is one of these it's in the following condition it has all of its features i've clicked all of its buttons everything works i didn't test recording it's fine and what that person issues is a warranty they say just like any other consumer warranty if you give me an additional six dollars on the transaction i will make a guarantee that this thing is in good working order and i've also got a precise specification for what this thing is it's a really simple really crisp transaction but that's not the only kind of information that we want about this thing right what other kinds of information do i want well i know what the object is i've got a specification for it what if i also want to know is this genuinely the thing that some pop star used to record their first album now i have a providence question so say that i want to know whether it's compatible with another device oh if i can can i plug this into my soundboard does that work oh actually let me check and some other person knows about the sound board can check compatibility so for even very ordinary objects what you need is three four five different kinds of knowledge which come together to give you the information you need to make a purchasing decision and that purchasing decision is how the thing goes one more time around the circular loop you know here is a steel beam that we're taking at the back of a building that we're disassembling okay great we got the steel beam is that safe to use in the building that i'm about to construct i need to figure that out well now i need what i need a mechanical engineer structural engineer i need somebody to maybe take some samples from the steel and verify that it is the steel we think it is there are a whole bunch of different things that we need to do before we can nail down for sure what it is that we're dealing with and that model right this is what we call the trust community that's the structure of the product information market and almost anything in the world which is bought and sold already has deep wells of expertise that could be structured into these trust communities if you're buying and selling guitars or shoes or cars or gold or anything somebody understands those markets inside out and if you can correctly financially incentivize them to give that knowledge to you in a forum you can act on we can start reattaching objects to their stories so we no longer have objects losing their value just because we no longer understand what they're worth it's a way of making sure that the objects don't wind up in landfill just

[32:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=1920s) because we forgot what they were um and this is the cracks right every object in the world we have a clear understanding of what it is it's searchable it's accessible it's reachable we know how to talk to it we know how to talk about it and as a result we can maximize the value of the post-consumer and indeed industrial stream of assets all the stuff that you bought that you used that you no longer think is quite as good as you wanted it to be you want something else you're bored you lost interest in skateboarding after you twisted your ankle all of that stuff immediately is routed to the person that values it most because we no longer have this problem that the second-hand goods lose their stories become obscure and then lose their value and getting the transparency about what things are and having that be multi-person verification from different people with different knowledge bases that's what we do that's how we're going to build a circular economy infrastructure for everything um you know one of my colleagues david leviner discusses this as a reversal of entropy which you know for that's a heck of a claim every time he says that i'm like really us but actually in a sense yes right we take a situation which is chaotic and disordered which is the waste stream we add structure to it using the product information market as a way of pulling out value where none previously was accessible indeed we are reversing entropy in a limited and not quite thermodynamic way um does it fix the world i think i've made a pretty good case about why this is actually an extremely helpful thing to do i'm just going to pass right over that so key features of how we do this this is not a theoretical system we launched the first version of the platform this year and we launched it for the goods which are already extremely circular so things which are already extremely circular um fine art right if you think of a you know monet painting very successfully circular one of our partner partners works in strandedvarious violins for the most part their violin house and you know it's 200 and something year old company that handles 350 year old instruments and they've been lovingly passed from hand to hand to hand to hand for three and a half centuries it gets no more circular than this we also work in gold bars so we have a gold bar set up with carbon offsets tied directly to the gold

[34:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=2070s) bar multi-point authentication about vaulting this stuff actually works so that's where we started and hence you know a bunch of blockchain infrastructure to move value around the system that's recording Ricardian contracts force of law this is the arbitration machinery so that somebody gives you product information and the product information is inaccurate if they don't pay their bills because they made a mistake and you claim the warranty we have enforcement mechanisms that will work in 160 countries we have custodians which give us the ability to store the goods securely which is again very important the warranty structure the thing that ties together all of the opinions about the object are these warranties and the asset passport is the actual structure online and i'll show you some pictures of those later on and now yeah i mentioned arbitration so that is a very simple model of the system it's a lot of separate moving parts right we have many many many different actors because we have buyers sellers people providing product information multiples insurance companies standing behind them court structures these are quite large things um and this is why i think we think of this as being an infrastructure platform because nobody is going to assemble that entire machinery themselves every time they want to sell a secondhand car it has to exist externally as a deeply dug in part of your society so that anytime you want to resell something you just put it into the pipe and off it goes okay now the fun part right blockchain the terrible terrible thing that has the carbon footprint of las vegas for a bunch of people to sling around imaginary money right i mean i've worked on it extensively i know what about it but it's impossible to shake the catastrophic environmental footprint that systems like bitcoin have so the avalanche system is one of the new third generation chains they've been live about a year maybe a little longer year and a half um based on a third generation consensus model so there are kind of three models of consensus there's what's called classical consensus uh which is all the distributed systems kind of in the old days then we have nakamoto consensus which is what you think of as bitcoin and ethereum and these kind of proof-of-work systems the avalanche system uses a technique called simulated annealing which was invented 40 50 years ago as a technique in artificial intelligence and simulation and it uses simulated annealing to reach

[37:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=2220s) incredibly fast cheap blockchain consensus with excellent analyzability the thing with algorithms is if the algorithm is sufficiently complicated it's very hard to predict future performance you just can't really tell what will happen the avalanche algorithm is very simple it's so simple but i did consider explaining it today um and if anybody wants an explanation come up to talk to me afterwards i will wave my hands for three minutes and you will understand how it works um part of what comes with that simplicity is utter mathematical predictability so they can see extremely precisely under what conditions it will succeed what conditions it will fail and that means they can run it extremely lean the total power consumption for the entire network is something like 100 kilowatts which is the same as half a dozen houses running their normal electricity loads it's a very very light system uh and as of yesterday they bought offset for what little carbon footprint they have the estimate they've got is a little bit below 70 tonnes the worst case scenario they had was about 430 tonnes and they bought about 500 and something tons worth of carbon so no probability they're nearly 10 times over offset even worse case scenario they've got 10 or 20 margin of error so at that point the entire transaction environment that we're going to be running this stuff on soon is reasonably light on its feet in terms of absolute consumption but is also offset to net zero and that's a big deal that's the first time anybody's done that for blockchain um why we're using it so publication on what something is the records about what this object are should be fully public because otherwise the buyers and the sellers don't know if somebody is lying to them if i've got private information about this object that i'm not disclosing i've no way of knowing when i buy it whether i've got full information so objects which are being sold the information should as far as possible be fully public there are some exceptions uh particularly in the art world but for the most part the things should be public change of ownership again for a large class of assets like houses and cars it's important we have public records who owns what um it is worth considering the extension of that paradigm to other classes of high-value goods particularly things which change ownership really quickly if you think of something like a professional tv camera it might change hands 50 or 100 times in a year if it's being rented so in those kind of situations being able to publicly see who's currently using that camera and who currently owns it might be important when couriers are shipping it around and something goes

[39:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=2370s) wrong you need to know who's currently attached to the camera guaranteed payments extremely useful so lots of these payments which we are doing between the people who are buying the object and the people that are providing warranties those payments are often very small 10 20 cents a dollar and to be able to do huge numbers of very small payments you don't want credit card style charges and also as the person buying the goods you want there to be no possibility that the payment for your warranty fails because if it fails you have no insurance so in that situation the public blockchain record of the payment is also the thing that gives you the proof of insurance so you can immediately know what the legal status is of the object that you're handling finally dispute resolution we refer to this as litigation-ready records management so all of the information about the objects from all the parties is structured in a way that if there is a legal dispute you don't have to go through a complex discovery phase you pull the information off the chain and you hand it to the arbitrator here are all the pertinent facts plus perhaps a couple of statements from the bars and sellers in dispute very very clean so how do you actually get involved in this um right now the system is live and it's running for what we term appreciating assets um gold collectibles fine art shortly whiskey wine and a couple other things there's a river of stuff coming out of hollywood which we're very excited about the appreciating asset practice is the thing allowed us to get the software set up and it's the thing that will allow us to you know generate more and more complex technology that a lot of people are using because those are markets where people are really immediately ready to pay for provenance and all of those markets are already extremely circular we just don't think of it as the circular economy because who thinks of an oil painting as a circular economy thing but it is so is a gold bar this is a half a million year old hand axe that we sold because we thought it was cool um here i should say this is on the openc website this is on ethereum so this is the pre-avalanche version of the system uh on ethereum we have to offset the transaction costs every time one of these things is created because they're burning so much carbon to run that system we just have to offset every transaction um openc is the big thing which is

[42:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=2520s) buying and selling nfts right now we are generating nfts as the way of actually representing the assets and the ownership of the assets because there's an enormous fully developed infrastructure that millions of people are using and we're just another set of traffic in that existing blockchain infrastructure um so openc is doing about 125 million dollars worth of nft transactions a day it's essentially ebay for nfts and our stuff just slots seamlessly into it now this is the Mattereum asset passport so this is the set of legal documentation the trust community the product information park it's the warranties all of that is tied up inside of our asset passport construct and you can see there are a large set of warranties this is a gold bar which is being sold as an art object so there is both intellectual property in the forms of some pictures plus seattle physical gold you can see there's a carbon offset and claim and that is live right now we have people buying and selling and trading gold bars bound to digital are as collectibles we offset the carbon for the bars and for the transaction so the mining of the gold itself is offset uh the physical mining and there are i think four sets of parties who have legal responsibility for those transactions so when you buy one of these bars you're getting multi-party warranties each warranty covers a different part of what makes the bar valuable and it's live now and that's like a real working system um so the take bank waste cycle infrastructure right amazon is kind of the peak of take make waste infrastructure it's a river of goods and unfortunately the vast majority of the goods that go down that river are going into landfill um this is going to become increasingly problematic as the circular economy becomes more and more and more assault after new default right that that just can't be how reality runs so what we're building is literally a circular economy structure which has the ability to grow not as a single monolithic megacorporation which owns everything and recycles it but as a set of protocols which exist between hundreds of millions of buyers and sellers and you know protocols data standardization dispute resolution basically as services which support an entire economy um that is you know the aspiration and the blockchain uniquely allows us to build

[44:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=2670s) these kind of systems because in the blockchain environment you don't have a single entity that owns the records for a physical thing right the blockchain is kind of a public utility anybody can write anybody can read you set some protocols up to make sure that you don't wind up with a bunch of destructive spam on your records keeping platforms but the actual data storage layer is independent of the people buying selling and providing the information which means that if all the people who are interested in an object lose interest in it the data is still there on the chain and the new owners of the object still have access to old records and they can continue to update and modify and write to those records um it's it's a very very tight fit for what we need in a circular economy because in a circular economy if the thing said 50 previous owners the original manufacturer is not going to be taking responsibility for those objects i will say actually this is a point i missed earlier on in the example of trust communities for things like electronics we would expect the original manufacturers to be a critical member of the trust community because for them to recertify the goods is in good condition is easier than for anybody else so if i'm the manufacturer of this object one of the ways that i make money from the circular economy is that i take these objects in i re-certify them and then the buyers and sellers pay me a warranty fee every time the object changes hands and for a large class of objects the manufacturers may actually be making more money re-certifying objects on behalf of other people that are selling them second hand then they get when they manufacture a new version of the object so it's not that the intention here is to cut the manufacturers out of the loop and then you know break their business models rather the manufacturers make pretty much the same amount of stuff they're making now the secondhand markets give them 10 times as many customers as they had because all the goods they produced in previous years are still in circulation and the manufacturers take a nick of all those transactions because they go and they re-certify the goods so this is not something where we're talking about applying pressure to manufacturers to make them make less stuff we have a world with near infinite human need you know every kid in mexico that wishes they had a laptop well if it's a 15 year old thinkpad running linux they're still in good shape so that possibility is that what we can use is the circular model to spread the existing manufacturing literally to the ends of the earth so that all of the goods which are on their 4th 5th 12th 15th owner continue to have utility

[47:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn46s1BTMEA&t=2820s) until they're literally no longer fit for purpose and very few things in this world are so broken that nobody would gladly have them um so this is basically the plan right you know we want to help all kinds of companies make huge leaps towards being net zero they don't have to radically overhaul what they're doing they don't have to radically overhaul their production processes we might need them to put unique serial numbers on a whole bunch of stuff that's currently kind of anonymous but we can start spreading the cost environmental and financial manufacturing and using these goods over much much wider ranges of people amortizing the damage the goods did in production immediately you know it's not a hard thing to go into the Mattereum system as long as we can individually identify exactly which products are which by something like a serial number we can plug them right into the system and we can begin to get these companies made circular immediately um let's see i'm just going to skip over here uh last thing um you have copies of my book i wrote this in the early stages of the pandemic um originally it was a tortoise project and then it came out as part of a something from untitled so it's part of a six books that are about the future there was the future of politics and there was the future of art and a few other things uh this is called the future of stuff and it's specifically a book about new human rights it's it's a book about the human right to know what is in the products that you're buying if you're wearing it if you're putting it on your body if you're eating it you have the right to know and that right is uh corresponds with the duty of the manufacturer to tell you right rights and duties come as pairs this is one of gandhi's key principles so it's a book about the human right to know what is in the things that you're buying and that applies to their carbon footprint it applies to the working and labor practices of the people that manufactured them um and yeah it's it's worth reading because it's part of the deep information intellectual superstructure of Mattereum also take a look at shaping things by bruce sterling and that is it thank you very much thank you veneer um we're gonna go next uh to orianna and then we'll go to greg

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/793-2.md (part 2 of 3).
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