Why does the Metaverse need Crypto? Or, specifically, why the Metaverse needs NFTs.
Crucially, the ownership layer for the Metaverse will ultimately reside on a public blockchain rather than a private database.
Read on to find out why.
Topic 1: What is the Metaverse?
Is it Facebook? Is it Epic? Is it Apple? Is it Otherside? Is it Decentraland?
No, in my opinion, the Metaverse is none of those things.
The metaverse at the most abstract level is the Internet, but this Internet has two differences.
The first difference is that the visualization layer of the Internet will get better and better.
Today, we have free global video conferencing and 4K movies on the Internet. We didn't have those before.
Ten years from now, we'll have "extended and mixed reality."
What is "Extended Functionality/Mixed Reality"?
Imagine a number of sunglasses with different sizes/weights/styles. The glasses will be able to switch between normal reality, augmented reality (digital objects overlaid on your field of view), and virtual reality.
We spend most of our time in augmented reality, not virtual reality. Imagine augmented reality untethering the screens of laptops and phones. Imagine walking on the beach, and instead of picking up your phone to read a notification, you can just swipe it out of the corner of your eye and see it. Imagine a colleague teleporting into your office for a chat or a brainstorming session, and they more or less look like they're actually there.
If the epidemic affects business travel, do you know how much imagination "transmission" can bring?
However, you also sometimes enter virtual reality. Maybe you want to walk around a room with data and documents with your colleagues, which is like a virtual workspace. Maybe you want to see ahead of time the hotel you're planning to visit, and you can walk through it in virtual reality and see the beach next to it, check out the pool. But you'll still be in augmented reality most of the time.
For the type of knowledge worker (me) who is looking at a screen all day anyway, this should be a quality of life improvement, not a decrease. Spend less time on screen and more time in a more natural user experience. And this will start to make your physical location almost irrelevant to the business destination. Basically everything except the social part of eating/drinking will be close to real life and no travel required.
Meanwhile, our computers will have better and better 3D spaces. Walking around and admiring the NFT gallery in metaverse space app OM (@OM100m) requires no special gear and is significantly better than browsing NFTs in 2D on OpenSea.
You can of course also go into the u/OM100 with VR goggles , but realistically, VR goggles are still annoying to this day — heavy, bulky, and short on battery life. I spend 99.9999% of my time in OM on my laptop.
But it will be a step forward, an incremental one, and the browser-based world will get better, and augmented reality devices will get better. Little by little, the visual layer of the internet will get better, until the virtual and the real become indistinguishable (about another 10 years or so).
As the visual layer of the internet gets better and better, digital objects will become more useful and important. Avatars (2D and 3D), art, school, work, 3D virtual spaces and hundreds of other things.
Not only do the objects themselves become more important, they also lead to different emergent behaviors. We've seen this with avatars and mixed names/pseudonyms/anonymous communities.
Yes, it's the Internet of the future, but...just as social media changed human behavior on the Internet, Metaverse-type experiences will change it even further.
NFT Twitter + Discord + various virtual worlds are a form of the early Metaverse. I feel like I'm entering a different world here than just some websites.
Now will determine the most important issues of internet/metaverse/human society health in 2030s.
The question is: "Who stores the ultimate record of ownership of these digital objects"
There are two answers: 1. The company's database; 2. The blockchain.
If we end up with "the company's database", we end up with all the web2 dysfunction, and worse. SMTP is an open protocol that anyone can use, so we don't have societal debates about who can use email. Online texting eventually became Twitter. So we ended up having the most ridiculous, surreal discussion on the topic of "who gets to use SMS" depending on "who is the CEO of Twitter"
This cannot possibly be the right architecture for our increasingly digitized economy. It's a win-win situation for everyone, including Twitter. Twitter can't rank all 8 billion people in the world or decide who's naughty or nice enough every day, it can just send a short message.
But if the Metaverse ends up being the social network it is today, with all your (important) digital assets behind API keys and terms of service agreements, it's going to be worse in multiple ways.
The first reason is rent-seeking.
Facebook proposes to take up to 47.5% of the revenue from each Metaverse object. Why would anyone, especially any non-US economy, want to hand over 50% of their digital GDP to Facebook? This number is simply ridiculously high.
The second reason is "fear" -> the metaverse will be your permanent digital reality that surrounds you. If you can get banned based on algorithmic flags or random user service policing, it's horrible. You can lose everything for no reason.
** The third is political security. **The situation is 100 times worse for other countries that have absolutely no say in this regard.
** The fourth is global national security. ** Augmented reality works by pointing the camera at your field of view.
Imagine if I handed out web2 execs with a camera and said, "Please put this on your head and your family's head and feed the traffic to 6529 servers. Don't worry, I have a privacy policy"
I'm obviously going to have a belly laugh. But that's what's going to happen to tech giants in the next few years. And that security honeypot—everyone's live-streaming view of the world—would be threatened with sabotage by hackers and security services.
What are NFTs?
A standardized, interoperable, portable, decentralized, autonomous, user-controlled, cross-application method to store any digital object.
In the simplest terms, any application that integrates ERC-721 can integrate the works of the CryptoPunks series. This is a very superior way to support innovation and interoperability.
In contrast, your Web2 digital objects are stuck in place, unable to move.
This may be one of the reasons why the metaverse needs NFT, what do you think?
**This article only represents the views of the original author and does not constitute any investment opinion or suggestion.