The Good Tech Companies - Cypherpunks Write Code: Vinay Gupta and Mattereum

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/cypherpunks-write-code-vinay-gupta-and-mattereum. People know Vinay Gupta for his work on Ethereum and Mattereum, and he’s also a remarkable cypherpunk. Let's know more about him and his milestones. Check more stories related to web3 at: https://hackernoon.com/c/web3. You can also check exclusive content about #obyte, #vinay-gupta, #cypherpunk-rebellion, #cypherpunks-write-code, #cypherpunks-and-blockchain, #eco-friendly-cryptocurrencies, #vinay-gupta-and-mattereum, #good-company, and more. This story was written by: @obyte. Learn more about this writer by checking @obyte's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. Vinay Gupta was an early adopter of E-Gold (a precursor of digital coins) and actively participated in its community in the 1990s until its shutdown. His practical view of cryptocurrencies and his resistance to state interference have established him as an influential voice in the crypto market. He is now recognized as a leader and innovator in the world of crypto.

This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. Cypherpunk's right code, Vinay Gupta and Matrium, by Obite. People know Vinay Gupta for his work on Ethereum and Matrium, and he's also a remarkable cypherpunk. He was an early adopter of e-gold, a precursor of digital coins, and actively participated in its community in the 1990s until ITS shutdown. His practical view of cryptocurrencies and his resistance to state interference have established him as an influential voice in the crypto market. In this article, we give recognition to Vinay Gupta as we're looking at how cypherpunks and their efforts

in coding have influenced the crypto world and beyond. Gupta's contribution testifies to the impact these pioneers have had on forging real online freedom. Born to an Indian mother and a Scottish father in January 1972, Gupta spent his childhood in the United Kingdom. He didn't complete his computer science degree at the University of Edinburgh, but he still managed to build a successful career in the technology industry. Gupta started his journey in commercial software development in 1992. His work spanned a variety of projects, including medical imaging, flight simulation, and disaster relief. Companies and organizations such as Silicon Graphics and the Internet Archive

have been his workplaces. He demonstrated his versatility as a developer there, but it was just the beginning. Around 1997, his commitment to cypherpunk ideals led him to join Crypto Rights, an organization that developed cryptographic software to combat human rights abuses in China. Since then, Gupta has continued his fight for the protection of human rights and digital liberty. A failure of cypherpunks. In the early 2010s, Gupta became attracted to distributed ledger technology, DLT. In 2015, he was a coordinator and an important participant in the launch of Ethereum. He also took advantage of his speech in the first DevCon to emphasize past mistakes made by the cypherpunk movement when creating economically sustainable systems, and offered

a potential solution for them. Greater than. This is the first large failure of cypherpunks, that we didn't manage to greater than sort out, which was we didn't manage to do sufficiently heavyweight funding of greater than public works, we didn't keep the money flowing in after the initial push was greater than made, which results in projects going into maintenance mode. For the greater than cypherpunk movement to succeed what we needed was voluntarist taxation. We greater than needed people to put a tithe of their income, maybe 10% as an allocated greater than preordained amount that would be spent building a future in which people have greater than liberty. Such a system hasn't been applied yet, but Gupta went forward with his own projects. He was a strategic architect for the Ethereum-related

firm ConsenSys and has been involved in the development of other projects besides Ethereum. He invented, for instance, the Hexayard shelter system. N***** This low-cost disaster shelter design has a place today in refugee camps and desert festivals like Burning Man. Gupta has also worked together with the United Nations and other organizations, and they've been exploring together how DLT tools could create a positive social impact. Gupta is now recognized as a leader and innovator in the crypto world. He has received invitations to speak at conferences worldwide and has written a lot on the subject. He holds a strong belief in the DTL potential, which he sees as a solution to

global challenges like poverty, inequality, and climate change. Materium and Sustainability Gupta founded Materium in 2017. This is an Internet of Agreement infrastructure project to digitize physical assets through a system of digital twin contracts. His vision revolves around creating legal contracts for physical objects, which can be digitally executed and fulfilled.

The goal of this method is to digitally manage physical assets in a way that is both efficient and transparent. Matarium has a goal to transform global commerce. It plans to do this through tokenization and fractionation of physical world assets while protecting them by international legislation. To make this possible, Matarium uses the Ricardian contract technology created by another cypherpunk, Ian Grigg. This technology combines cryptographically signed contracts that favor legal pros, readable by both humans and machines. The semantic richness of Ricardian contracts

is a key feature. In case of adispute, it allows for a resolution through an arbitration process. Moreover, the world's manufactured goods tokenization could lead to an efficient global market. In this market, assets can be bought, sold, rented, allocated, and divided through non-fungible tokens, NFTs. Materium is also tackling a consumer issue. Consumers often buy goods to be quickly thrown away, without even knowing their origin or ecological impact. To address this, Materium introduced Materium Asset Passports, MAP. MAP uses suites of contracts to define asset value and risks. This encourages manufacturers and consumers to move towards total

sustainability. In this new model, the goods have a transparent origin and are designed to be resold or used later over many years in what they call a spiral economy. This drastically reduces waste for the future. As Gupta said himself, nothing is so loved that it needs to be thrown away. Tokens and contracts for the future. The cypherpunk ideals promote the adoption of robust cryptography and technologies that enhance privacy, security, and online freedom for everyone. These are seen as a route to affect social and political change. In the same line of thought, Matterium and Obite are clear exponents of this worldview. Obite shares some aspects of Matterium's vision to advance asset tokenization and

sustainability. On Obite, assets are tokenized within an environmentally friendly directed acyclic graph, DAG, making it easy and inexpensive to create custom assets. This asset tokenization process involves converting ownership rights over any physical or digital asset into tokens on the ledger. Besides, Obite offers prosaic contracts, loosely similar to the legally binding Ricardian contracts. These are conventional contracts written in natural language, readable by humans, signed digitally, and enforceable by international law. This feature allows two parties to cryptographically sign the contract text using their wallets while registering the agreement

forever on the DAG. They're not as automatic as smart contracts, though. So, in case of a dispute, either party can disclose the document and conditions to a legal third party. On the other hand, Obite has contracts with Arbitration 2, which are closer to Ricardian contracts in functionality. They're smart contracts combined with conventional contracts with the addition of a professional arbiter from the ARB store, available to solve any potential disputes. Users can offer that type of smart contract from the wallet to anyone worldwide, without coding, and knowing that they'll be protected against fraud by the arbiters. Unlike what happens with traditional legal contracts, they won't need to spend high fees and long periods in a legal court. Instead, they can pay a small fee to the ARB store arbiter they chose

to quickly solve any dispute that may arise. This way, Obite is streamlining the process of dispute resolution and asset management, fostering a more accessible, sustainable, and secure digital economy. Read more from Cypher Punk's Right Code series Tim May and Crypto Anarchism. Way Die and Be Money. Nick Sabo and Smart Contracts. Adam Back and Hashgash. Eric Hughes and Remailer. Saint Jude and Community Memory. Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Hal Finney and RPOW. John Gilmore and F. Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin. Gregory Maxwell and Bitcoin Core. Featured vector image by Gary Killian. Free pic photograph of Vinay Gupta by Mathuriam Thank you for listening to this

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