Comment by thundergolfer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thundergolfer | Hacker News Reader

I've read Neuromancer, The Diamond Age, and part of Snowcrash, and I'm still very pro-Metaverse as a pie-in-the-sky concept, but this recent VC-hype writing about Metaverses does not grab me at all.

If you skip through the series to 'Evolving User + Business Behaviors and the Metaverse' you avoid the hand-waving tech roadmapping and get to how this technology is supposed to change people's lives, and what's described is (mostly) super entertainment-oriented, consumerist, and corporate-crossover-branded to the point of self-parody.

At times I get the vibe that VCs are very keen on having "Fornite but you spend $10,000s more on digital clothing, steroids, vehicles, and housing because you no longer care about the physical world. Oh and the sex workers are now digital. Your 'friends' are digital too, and also computer algorithms." No thanks.

It approaches something like Infinite Jest's Samizdat videotape. Entertainment perfection so engrossing it may literally kill you (if Facebook hasn't made sure you're hooked up to food, water, and sanitation systems).

Agreed, a lot of is strikes me as a very recent hype-cycle that seems to have materialized out of thin air.

Which to be clear is not to say that the concept of the metaverse is somehow recent - it's exactly as old as it's made out to be, but the obsession - particularly from SV elites/VCs - seems to have manifested very recently.

One thing that also rubs me the wrong way is that it's nearly always accompanied with cryptocurrency boosterism - even though I see absolutely no reason why NFTs or Bitcoin or Ether or Tether would be a critical part of the metaverse at all. At worst it seems like a transparent attempt to shoehorn something that has proven to have few applications outside of raw speculation, into a concept that might actually be interesting.

The total failure to also acknowledge that depictions of the metaverse are overwhelmingly dystopian is also alarming. I have some willingness to believe that a virtual universe could be a benefit to people - but "let's recreate Snow Crash!" is... not that.

I think NFTs are a perfect fit for a metaverse. For example, you could purchase a game element (skin or something) and own digital rights to it. It would be authentic on the blockchain with provenance and portable. You could take that skin from game to game, each separate game using the blockchain to validate authenticity and render it as yours and only yours (or limited edition). This will give users social status capital in that meta world.

I’m not disagreeing with your overall characterization, but I think NFTs in particular are poised to be a very integral part of the purportedly forthcoming metaverse.

But... what's the benefit here?

Why can't I buy the game item with actual fiat currency (or its many non-crypto microcurrency equivalents like what MS and Sony operate for their stores)? They can also intermediate its authenticity and ownership between games.

This is how things work right now - there are lots of promos where some in-game addon or item is provided upon validating ownership of some other thing. All of the major stores (see: Steam, PS, Xbox) provide this functionality.

The only real difference here seems to be decentralization - but how does that benefit me as a consumer? I know there's a lot of words spewing around re: "authenticity", but I still fail to see the practical applications of a virtual hologram sticker on horse armor.

But this echoes my overall feelings about crypto - it presents many downsides and few upsides. The only consistent upside it provides is decentralization - but it's only an "upside" insofar as it is ideologically attractive to adherents. In nearly all cases the decentralization provides no tangible benefit to the bearer.

Well, the decentralization of it would promote interoperability between game vendors and protect the consumer from vendor lock-in.

If game company A goes out of business, they won’t take your digital asset with them.

Additionally, a skin (for this example), could also be rendered decades from now in a retro-style game arcade within the metaverse. The permanence of the blockchain will probably outlive most access keys to it.

A father could pass down his private keys and digital assets to his child as his legacy.

It’s a brave new metaworld.

> Additionally, a skin (for this example), could also be rendered decades from now in a retro-style game arcade within the metaverse. The permanence of the blockchain will probably outlive most access keys to it.

But this isn't how any blockchain is currently implemented. With NFTs the underlying asset is not actually stored on the blockchain - URLs are, and the URLs are just as prone to being dead as the companies that own them.

I can see maybe a point with decentralization being a guard against bitrot, but that isn't how it works? Hell, there are already NFTs with dead URL pointers, so they are now nothing more than certificates of authenticity to content that is unviewable. The hypothetical retro skin will die when the company that issued it goes out of business - all the blockchain will give you is a permanent faint outline of the content where it used to be, it doesn't preserve the content itself.

The content itself can be preserved by putting it on chain, in IPFS, or in some other future persistent content storage system.

There are a lot of junk NFTs now, but it doesn’t have to be that way

Exactly, and the delivery model for this will likely be HTML5 via the web.

> It approaches something like Infinite Jest's Samizdat videotape

Small, but crucial difference: the Samizdat did not involve money transactions :)

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