I agree this is one facet, but other is we now have a trustless ownership protocol (ie. cryto + NFTs) that will lay the foundation for people "caring" about the stuff and status you have in the metaverse.
I disagree with the whole “value of ownership” thing. Making knock off nfts is trivial, so this relies on people caring enough about provenance to police this and shame people that have knock offs in their virtual environment.
Digital goods can be copied for free. It’s the killer feature of digital. No more scarcity!! Any system that fails to embrace this will be outcompeted long term. See the music industry.
Because the bullying at school for having non-brand clothing or things wasn't enough. You'll need Supreme(TM) nfts, or become a digital pariah?
The web 1.0 and 2.0 way of thinking if we build the product, then we own the community.
The web 3.0 way of thinking is there are existing communities out there (BAYC, Punks, etc.) that we can enable to use our product and come into our space.
And this is already happening.
Their parties this last week in NYC for NFT week pretty much locked them as the model to strive for. I don't know if others can do it, but they've set the standard.
C'mon. This is very "rich nerds desperately trying to be cool", it's not an actual thing that normal people will ever care about. We already have status symbols that you can show off in the real world.
It seems to me that they need Twitter (and Discord, etc) way more than the other way around. No enabling required.
People care about status and authenticity.
Imagine a virtual world where
1. You have the validate you are an avatar you own
2. You can be anything you want
The virtual world 1 is way more interesting because it's authentic and the people of status will want to use it and people of less status will build towards being higher status.
E.g. if someone _does_ try to create an NFT for the Mona Lisa, our ability to refute / accept its authenticity is premised on the knowledge that in the real world, the French Republic itself owns the work. How would we trust that the keys associated with minting the NFT were controlled by the French Republic? Presumably we'd need some public statement of attestation from an official French government body, and perhaps with the concurrence of others, to have confidence that this wasn't a rogue intern at the Ministry of Culture, or a hacker that got control to some official accounts or pages.
But applying this logic to "avatars" seems to be either broken or creepy. Who has the authority to say that you are or aren't you?
To my layperson's view (this is def not my wheelhouse), either such an authority exists (even if it's a foundation backed by several "actors who align based on shared interests"), in which case we're going to be required to trust it so we may as well drop the overhead of the blockchain, or no such authority exists, and there's a potentially high degree of fragmentation among platforms recognizing different subsets of ownership (or identity, or canonicity of speech or whatever), in which case ... is it a metaverse or just a bunch of distinct rooms?
> There really won’t be another platform turnover to try to correct the error and disrupt the existing players as there has been for the last several computing platform changes.
What makes you say that with such apparent confidence?
As far as “the final platform” bit, it’s an opinion but if you presume we get to a point where most humans are having their auditory and visual systems being overridden by a hardware/software computing stack, it’s hard to think of a breakout event from that that is analogous to eg PC -> mobile. There will be competition and iteration, but overall the inputs and outputs to that system are (body state) -> (photons, sound) and that seems like it won’t really change for a long time, if ever, so harder to disrupt at the root.
The "metaverse" (not Facebook's) can be an open source platform where anyone can create their own worlds which accept the items they've added support for. This is the direction Decentraland is going in.
The core libraries to build your world will be open source and standardized, like a game engine, but the actual content will be up to the creators.
You’re presuming a scenario where the structure of government changes is the same as a civilizational collapse. That’s not a given.
> Future metaverse platforms will partner with high quality communities
How does one decide authenticity?
> That's the whole innovation behind the blockchain. Decentralized ownership claims.
And once you have an answer to such a question (relying on some preexisting system of ownership in the real world), then why should we care about tokens?
> For example, you could care about the token for the specific "metaverse" you're playing in
Who has the authority to say that you are or aren't you?
> I think you're touching on a very philosophically deep question of who you are. You think that the things you are and that you own are inherently yours, but I would argue your stuff and even your identity is all a social construct.
> For example, if you woke up tomorrow and everyone around you collectively agreed to say that you're insane and that you're an alien. Are you going to trust your own memories or are you going to trust the people around you.
> But I think you're missing out on the core innovation of blockchain which mimics the same way we determine who owns anything, which is completely a social construct.
What use are NFTs in such a world? If it's permissioned anyway, and there's only a few approved vendors, you can do this with a database. Suppose you already developed a Roblox/Fortnite/Minecraft metaverse, why do you want NFTs on top of that?
Ponder that question and you'll have your answer.
What does a Google/Facebook/Microsoft metaverse want NFTs for? Once you start enforcing permissions on which issuers the metaverse honors, the metaverse might as well skip the whole NFT thing and use a database.
It's unlikely there will be one decentralized world (maybe a lobby of some sort, akin to a website directory on the early internet), but instead an Engine + SDK that allows anyone to build their own worlds and choose what NFT's are useable inside it. These worlds can be registered to Ethereum and then users can easily explore and congregate in whatever worlds they wish.
How about a virtual world of no ownership? Why must we give the wealthy yet another venue to lord their status over us?
I am very tired of watching humans constantly try to impose real-world economic scarcity into a digital land of infinite plenty. Rather than fight the nature of a digital economy, why not embrace it?
Besides, NFTs actually embrace your philosophy: allow copies, and shift scarcity elsewhere to things like social status. It is not DRM, obviously. You should be a fan.
Permitting ownership enables an unnecessary layer of stratification that humanity is best without, in a rare environment that actually allows for the lack of it.
Such is the nature of idealism. It is a shame we allow a world of plenty to artificially lock up value so a few people can feel better than others
Alternatively, why is a piece of data not allowed to just be? You can see this everywhere, even outside the digital world and in the realm of the mind. An idea is never allowed to stand on its own merits, we always have to attach our bullshit culture to it
Your proposed world is to say we ought to just not have people create lots of stuff they would have otherwise, in the name upholding a philosophical principle. Which is fine, but own that, and don’t act as though its the just the deficiencies of others leading to a world where you do not get a endless stream of value from them.
If it would mean less profiteers, less fakers, less pretenders, less sharks, less debutantes, less tourists... I'm all for it.
There are plenty of ways to profit as an artist without locking up one's work to a privileged few
Will the artistic landscape be different? Sure. But it would be a worthy change.
NFTs are dumb but so is the concept of no ownership in a way that conflates definitions so.
If it is popular to have say a World Tree in a pool as your spawn point and said map is a popular one you would still have instance ownership even if the map itself is free software. Having your own instance would be found preferrable to most compared to a common flooded one with millions clipping through each other and trolls rampant.
I don't really understand how lack of ownership strips the ability to shard instances.
> because they are the ones making, running, and maintaining the goddamned servers in question!
They are, because they are most capable. But do not underestimate that others do so as well, often in a much more just and equitable fashion. (See: The Pirate Bay/private trackers vs Spotify or Youtube)
And watch what you call juvenile, that perspective explains the world so much more clearly than any explanation that the guilty might offer