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.
The virtual stuff you "own" in virtual environments are going to be siloed in individual companies' ecosystems. Just like GTA Online is never going to give me any sort of benefit from the fancy sword I have in World of Warcraft, neither is Facebook/Meta going give me any benefit from the couch I have in whatever system Microsoft or Valve puts out. NFTs are never going to materialize into that sort of cross-ecosystem unified ownership because no large company benefits from honoring assets obtained in another company's ecosystem.
This is already happening. You're thinking about this in reverse.
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.
Okay, but these people are already on Twitter and Twitter doesn't do any work to verify that they "own" the NFT for their BAYC avatar or whatever. But they like Twitter, so they hang out there anyway even though anyone could "rip off" their NFT and tweet it or use it as their avatar.
It seems to me that they need Twitter (and Discord, etc) way more than the other way around. No enabling required.
BAYC is light years beyond everything else in the NFT space. The way they've built a community and played up their cool factor to make you want to be a part of it all is impressive.
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.
At every cryptocurrency party I've been to, the people (i.e., the normal ones, not the true believers) stop coming when the free drinks and food stop flowing. I wouldn't confuse that with a "cool factor."
Never say never. A “stuff” import seems like the kind of feature that would have to be copied by other platforms as soon as one does it, but there’s a chicken and egg aspect.
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.
What stops me from minting an NFT that says I own anything I want? If platforms are only honoring NFTs minted by other platforms then they might as well just share that information in a database.
Same way you can't just print out a copy of the mona lisa?
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.
Who arbitrates which NFTs-based claims are respected versus not? How does one decide authenticity? 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?
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?
Right, it's just shoving some arbitrary data in a decentralized database. People will still need to get together and agree on which bits of data to care about, and at that point the blockchain is adding very little value besides a cumbersome way to transfer ownership.
The value is that the blockchains (or analogous tech) maximize durability and odds of societal consensus across time and space. For example, I would put higher odds on the Ethereum blockchain still existing and being citable in a century or two than most centralized authorities today. (These may be low odds in absolute terms, but in relative terms I think the Ethereum chain wins.)
I can only speak for myself, but I do not feel any particular predilection towards "social consensus" when I'm told that a think has cryptocurrencies mixed into it. If anything, it's a negative signal that tells me that someone has undisclosed financial interests in whatever they're trying to tell me about.
Sure, the argument made by crypto people is that is a transitional condition and in a few decades society at large will in general consider information on blockchains (or their descendants) as authoritative in many situations.
Sure, I can understand the vision. I guess the more salient "why?" question is the one that still feels lacking to me. Current easy money aside, it's not clear why society as a whole would be willing to cast aside the last 250 years of physical ownership and financial infrastructure in exchange for digital ownership(?) and immutable ledgers with irrecoverable error conditions.
Sounds like the same fallacy as preppers getting ripped off buying Krugerrands at a premium to keep value safe after a complete collapse of all civilization. When it is like putting platforms on the boughs of a tree to stay safe when the trunk is cut and felled. It fundamentally misunderstands the order of dependencies.
I think that’s actually it’s own fallacy: presuming that one can predict the dependencies and survivorship of various elements of society in a scenario where one or two larger ones go through a disruptive transition. This is a contradiction in many cases, because if you could know how such a disruption was actually going to play out, it would be unlikely to actually happen. If our kids are growing up in a world that is fundamentally different than ours in terms of sovereignty, it is very hard to know what the side effects of that transition will be.
You’re presuming a scenario where the structure of government changes is the same as a civilizational collapse. That’s not a given.
Okay, Ethereum is still around, but all it says is that in 2023 you bought a string of digits that referred to a special hat in Fortnite. But it's 2040 now and the special hat has linkrotted away because Fortnite got taken over by Zuckerberg.
It’s hard to say if the link rot will be a problem. Not to mention, many of these ownership transactions won’t be links. The point is being able to agree on something, not have access to the underlying. The latter is a somewhat orthogonal concern. No matter what Zuck does, it won’t be possible for people to deny who owned the hat, regardless of if the underlying bits of the hat have gone away. And of course, for the things that people actually care about, these bits will be preserved, or over time the ownership will be understood to relate to new, probably better bits.
Who arbitrates which NFTs-based claims are respected versus not?
> 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.
The people who decide which NFTs matter are the communities and cultures you participate in, and entities who have sovereignty over you. Which is no different than anything else.
Right but the point the grandparent I was adding to, and also what I understand delecti is saying is roughly: Meta or a similar platform is an "entity who has sovereignty". For users to have a coherent experience in the platform, it may essentially be required that the platform exercises some decision-making power on what NFTs to respect and which not to. Do I get to bring in and use item X just because I say I own it, or not? Once the platform is exercising a choice on how/when to recognize ownership or not, the ownership system is no longer "trustless" and why should we bother with the complexity?
I would agree a centralized authority like Facebook basically “owning” what gets blessed is a world where the promise of these technologies has not been met. The hope is that we can have a more egalitarian outcome where there are a variety of actors who align based on shared interests to agree on what contracts to recognize and confer benefits based on. Of course, one challenge with realizing this can be seen elsewhere in this thread, where people are dismissive of the entire concept (and ironically have boxed it in as a Facebook thing now, effectively ceding the entire territory before the first battle.) It’s important that technologists get sped up on what is at stake and the likelihood that correcting a misstep will be hard or impossible for future generations if a singular entity “wins” this emerging space in the next several years. 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.
We're perhaps escaping the reasonable scope for a thread like this, but can you point to something that describes a potential version of "the metaverse" where no such authority exists in any form?
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?
I think the web and Internet have some centralization obviously but they are good counterexamples to a theoretical corporate monopoly or duopoly over a computing medium.
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.
It's unlikely there will be one "world" with overseers and moderators, just like the internet is not one website.
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.
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?
It's pretty easy to setup your own private WoW server where you can give yourself all the best items. Why do people then spend hundreds of hours grinding for them on official servers?
Sure, but WoW doesn't use NFTs to enforce scarcity.
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.
Well yea, if one company runs the Metaverse they don't need NFT's. NFT's are for places like Decentraland and other Metaverses running on Ethereum where there is no centralized manager of the world.
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.
The ultimate scarcity is human attention and creativity - so in the limit that will always be a thing that is a form of wealth. The ownership of digital assets (NFTs or not) is fundamentally an output of a system where someone chooses to expend creative energy into making the asset, and traded that opportunity cost off based on the expected outcome. A scenario where that work would not be something they could capture value from by enforcement mechanisms of scarcity would lead to some of these efforts not happening. (Not all of course, many people do amazing CC licensed work. But it doesn’t pay the bills.)
But digital is a realm of infinite copying, and where true ownership of bits means that you can never show them off (like Shkreli and that A Tribe Called Quest album). NFT 'ownership' is an additional layer on top of the data that can easily be stripped away, as the exclusivity only exists in the minds of those gullible enough to actually value it.
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?
People who want to create works that can be infinitely copied, will. People who want to create works that have various kinds of cultural norms imposing scarcity, will. There is no “fight”, it’s just saying that you’d prefer less options for people to choose how to expend their creative energy. Nobody is stopping a person from turning the knob all the way to “infinite free copies,” but the idea here is to make a knob that is granular, multidimensional, and under their control, as opposed to under the control of a few centralized actors.
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.
While they permit infinite copies, the ownership bit strips away potential egalitarianism. Scarcity needs to be stripped and not an option. There shouldn't be a knob that allows one to select 'infinite copies', that should be the default. And ownership should either be collective or none at all.
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.
You don't get to decide that. Your prejudices and carefully bonsaie gardened imperatives about how you think the world should work be do not change that fact any more than the tantrums in congresses and parliaments demanding encryption that doesn't work for "bad guys". It is fundamentally about information and its shapes.
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
You have a fundamental misunderstanding. The point is you simply will not get certain creative works in this model. They will not be worth the opportunity cost. There is no reality where you get “no scarcity” as well as “all the creative works you would have gotten with scarcity.” (Ie, probably most of those which have led to our present day wealth.)
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.
I'm willing to lose "some" creative works because of a lack of scarcity. Speaking from experience, artists will always want to create. That is the creative drive. There is no reason that work should not be accessible to all if the technology allows for it.
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.
What you’re saying is that the artists who are currently paid for their work either will create it gratis or we can live without it. A fairly bold claim to make that this would be a worthy change, given the loss of creative work and loss of quality of life to those who create it that it would yield. Particularly when the counter argument is just to let artists produce work on their own terms, which will arguably be a better local maximum of the version of the world you advocate for and the one we have today.
Like the answer to all of the juvenile notions of "the rich" - because they are the ones making, running, and maintaining the goddamned servers in question!
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.
> 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
