And before that they financed a significant part of their government's budget selling postage stamps to kids like me. Recognized sovereignty can be a source of money in all sorts of ways.
So they can exist forth on the metaverse.
That is a very grim assessment. But yeah they might become the worlds first virtualized state for stateless people.
I can already see the Press Release: Meta preserves the Culture and unique Landmarks of Tuvalu on the Metaverse. The State of Tuvalu lives on through the efforts of Meta and is the first fully virtual State.
i can see the headline now, Tuvalu crashed today after a memory leak in the last unity update caused the citizens clients end render to crash when to many npc were on screen at the same time. a patch for tuavalu should be out soem time in the next few days citizens are not recommended to role back to the previous version as it contains a know zero-day exploit.
“We have incorporated their diversity into our own. We are Borg.”