Thread by @punk6529

1/ On Metaverse

"But in the metaverse" is a running joke on cryptotwitter

I regret to inform you that it is no joke.

What we are playing for is whether our children will be fully free or residents in a digital company universe - with the illusion of free, but not really free

2/ The Wikipedia definition is OK

"The Metaverse is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet."

3/ In other words, the metaverse is a superset of virtual realities, augmented realities and the internet.

NFT Twitter & Discord is a form of proto-metaverse, with its avatars, shared communities and shared 2D/3D spaces (@opensea, @oncyber, @decentraland), hanging off it.

4/ And this is, of course, a continuation of decades of internet communities from bulletin boards to AOL to modern social networks

So what is different now? Why does this feel different?

5/ So what is different now? Well, global internet scale for one, but more importantly:

- Crypto/NFTs

and

- UX

6/ Crypto, and in particular NFTs, have converted our online communities for the very first time into an ownership society.

Your avatar, your digital art, your in-game items, your gallery template are all NFTs and they are genuinely owned by you

7/ This is very new, very different.

You are not a 'user' on the flip side of an EULA, a mere guest on someone's server with effectively no rights whatsoever, but a true sovereign owner of your digital objects.

It is BTC, but for everything digital

8/ The scale and breadth of what this can unleash is astounding as you get huge decentralized global communities coordinated with economic incentives.

Crypto is like 5x normie speed. NFTs are 2x to 3x crypto speed

9/ What about UX? This is what drives the jokes right now. 3D worlds are still clunky.

Interesting, but not ready for consumer prime-time YET.

I like Decentraland, but my information flow is 100x better on Twitter

10/ The UX issue is going to be solved in the 2020s.
You can expect photorealistic mixed reality (augmented reality, virtual reality and real reality) with minimal lag in non-ridiculous devices this decade.

Mixed realty (the Metaverse) will be just your regular life

11/ 6529 is not the only person that has noticed this.

Some of the smartest people in tech also know this, including:

1) Mark Zuckerberg
2) Epic

theverge.com/22588022/mark-…

epicgames.com/site/en-US/new…

12/ This is both good because they have the money to invest in improving the tech but this bad because the goal will be walled gardens.

You already can't access the best VR hardware in the market without a Facebook account which is, to me, alarming

13/ Unfortunately right now we have few allies:

a) China is going walled garden

b) US political leadership is not thinking strategically, sees everything through an AML/KYC lens

c) EU is determined to learn nothing from the last 30 years of tech failures

14/ The SEC securities rules are also brutal.

I know why they exist and how they protect, but in a decentralized world, they are a huge regulatory moat for incumbents vs decentralized coalitions working to build anything from art projects to VR hardware

15/ I have so many ideas I would like to push to crowd-build but I have not yet found a way to do it without possibly creating an unregistered security.

It is a serious issue and not even on the agenda really regulatorily as a high-level anti-concentration measure

16/ So anon fam, for right now, we are on our own.

We have to build, build, build now, as fast as possible, to make the default decision for corporations to join the open system, not to try to capture a closed one

17/ We are all in this together. Don't sweat the differences between punks / BAYC / AB or 1/1s.

Right now we need to scale and onboard everyone.

If we can get 1M, 10M, 100M, 1B people the experience of owning their digital assets, good luck to the in-game closed store.

18/ Also, don't let people from inside the system bully you for using the basic tools that our society is organized with

Facebook has access to Mark Z's prodigious talent because he has made $129B from Facebook.

19/ Yet people who fund Facebook and Nike and Disney and their huge executive salaries with their spending and time are often offended that someone made money from a JPG

This is silly. If we concede "money" to the system, it is game over. Everyone needs money in this world.

20/ tl;dr

The Metaverse will actually happen this decade.

If it is open, human innovation will flourish. If it is closed, we are digital serfs of sorts.

We 100,000 or so people right now are the front-line in this battle and we have to do it ourselves

21/ As always

Don't let the institutions steal your JPGs

🥷🥷🥷🥷🥷