Let's talk about the Metaverse...

There are a lot of words floating around about “metaverse this” and “metaverse that..”

What’s the big deal?

Well actually, it is quite a big deal. If you haven’t seen the Steven Spielberg Sci-Fi movie “Ready Player One” it’s about a dystopian future in which people live the majority of their lives in a Virtual Reality called “OASIS”, a utopian society where everything is better than the real world.

The moral of the movie is not to live your best life in VR (ie metaverse), whilst ignoring your real life (“meat-space” as Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin likes to call it!)

Regardless of the doom and gloom and Science Fiction warnings of potential for harm to humanity, the metaverse is actually a Very Good Thing.

Firstly, assuming an open source metaverse is not controlled by a large corporation (Facebook / Meta I’m talking to you), a VR space is actually the most democratic thing you could ever have.

There are no governments controlling your movements or your VR life, no corruption, no hidden agendas or paid special interests. It is as libertarian as they come.

In the metaverse you are free to be whoever you want to be. The “skins” that you purchase that represent “you” (or the version of “you” that you decide to portray on any given day), are sold as NFTs.

Meat-spacers will say “why would you buy an NFT that only exists digitally? It has no value” are completely missing the point. An Instagram or twitter “blue tick” gives you social standing digitally, more so than anything in meat-space. You can’t see a “blue tick”, but you automatically add social standing to the person that has a “blue tick”. And you do this in real life, even though the blue tick is only digital.

NFTs and blockchains are also publicly viewable ledgers. This means that if you wish, you can flaunt your “wallet address” and everyone in the metaverse can see how much you are “worth”. Of course there are security concerns around this and not everyone wants to put a target on their back as to their net worth, but an interesting concept nonetheless.

Teleportation? Beam me up Scotty! If part of the metaverse is a complete digital copy of places on Earth, why can’t we immediately teleport to another city or country instantaneously? There are enough CCTV cameras around major cities in the world such that any street corner can be replicated real time in code in a metaverse. Imagine walking down the streets of New York one minute, and then the waterfront of Barcelona the next.

If you haven’t checked out the latest VR headsets such as Oculus Quest 2 or the HTC Vive, then you will probably not quite have an idea of how far technology has come, and how close the metaverse really is. The experience is intensively immersive. If the technology looks like this in the early 2020’s, then imagine what it will be like in 10 years, or 20 years. The metaverse will be indistinguishable from reality.

In fact, here is an interesting thought experiment. Perhaps we are all now living in the year 3000, plugged into a VR machine, and we have forgotten (or programmed ourselves to forget) that is our real timeline. We could be schoolkids on a VR excursion to experience life in the 2020’s. (just like you go to a museum now to see what life was like in the Middle Ages). When we die in this “lifetime”, we are brought back to the Year 3000 when we plugged ourselves in. School history class time is over, hop in the space cruiser to go home for dinner.

As Elon Musk says, there is a non-zero probability we are all living in a simulation. Maybe the Matrix is more real than we all think.

The metaverse is coming, and it will be a golden age of human exploration and development. CryptoCrewz will be a major player in the metaverse. Hope to see you there.