Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

A disappointing article that’s not a manifesto in any sense. The author doesn’t seem interested in exploring prior art at all, and there’s plenty starting from VRML which was briefly the hype around 1996.

Crypto claims are repeated without criticism. For example:

“With blockchain, users can maintain a consistent identity across the metaverse simply by verifying their wallet address, which nobody else would have access to.”

How do you know address 0x381638eef881 is the Jane Doe who went to your high school? It’s not intrinsically a better identifier than janedoe31@gmail.com.

You can’t expect people to have a single wallet address all their lives — keys get lost, etc. And if you need a third party to provide an identity layer, well, that’s just another Facebook. (Which of course the VCs hope that they’ll be the ones to fund.)

You inspired me to go have a look at VRML. With all respect to the work that has been done, its so incomprehensible to anybody outside the field. And it seems the modern version of it (X3D) is more focused on specifying individual scenes and behaviours, where what we need for the metaverse is the magic sauce that lets people build separate worlds independently and join them together through links. What does a link look like in such a world? is it a door I walk through? a button I press?

We need something radically clearer and simpler to make it successful. I wish I could believe Zuckerberg really wants to build it but it is so hard to see him have the kind of altruism necessary to build any kind of open platform.

Yes, it takes a remarkable amount of mental gymnastics to reconcile decentralized transparent information and the Facebook corporation.

I’m saying the existence of crypto wallets does nothing to prevent another Facebook (or indeed the same one), just like the existence of PGP did nothing to prevent Facebook.

The metaverse identity problem is the same as the web identity problem, and it is in no way solved by yet another identifier just because you can attach a pointer to a monkey JPEG to it.

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