The emergence of the metaverse

Block unicorn

特邀专栏作者

2021-09-02 15:34 (UTC+8)

This article is about 9487 words, reading the full article takes about 14 minutes

Building the Metaverse from the bottom up, the Metaverse is a new organization for the digital age.

AI Summary

Expand

Building the Metaverse from the bottom up, the Metaverse is a new organization for the digital age.

Article translation: Block unicorn

As the energy of the NFT mania grows, so does the conversation around the “metaverse.” We all talk about the "Metaverse," but no one tries to define it meaningfully.

This article offers an actionable suggestion of what the Metaverse actually is.

The "metaverse" will be an orchestration of many different layers and technologies, but it will eventually collapse on a single shared source of truth to which all components of the metaverse will abide.

The metaverse will consist of objects, all of which must know that all other objects exist. From this, we can create a ledger of all objects in the known metaverse, along with their shared history of interactions and stories.

Understanding the Metaverse requires stripping it into its component parts and then reassembling them into a single narrative of what "it" is.

let's continue.

Article Lego Bricks

Like Ethereum’s currency Lego blocks, my previous articles stack on top of each other, and it’s important to read them in order to bring the stream of consciousness to the next one.

This article builds on three other articles I wrote. While this article can be read on its own, further investigation can be supplemented by reading the preceding articles:

a country without banks

The encrypted economic system (Ethereum) is the next evolution of human mass coordination. From hunter-gatherers, to religion, to nation-states, to digital protocols, humans have found better and better technologies to operate in larger-scale group coordination. Ethereum hosts a digital nation in the cloud that operates with bottom-up incentives rather than top-down coercion.

Number Leviathan

Continuing from the bankless state, the Ethereum protocol is an extension of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, but instead of an absolute monarchy or executive leadership, control over the Leviathan is broken and shared among the people who make up the Leviathan body.

This has injected new vitality into the concept of "owned by the people and for the people".

digital cultural revolution

The crypto revolution is a monetary and technological revolution, but the legacy of crypto will be the renaissance of human culture. Ethereum facilitates the creation of infinitely different digital cultures because these cultures finally have an economic foundation. This renaissance will unfold by aligning the market value of assets more closely with the value of our people.

Building the Metaverse from the bottom up

The Metaverse is the new organization of the digital age. But we've seen this before! Before we define the metaverse, we need to define the iterations that preceded it.

looks like a nation state

I recently read Seeing like a State, which illustrates what it's like to look at from a nation-state perspective. A nation-state is a continuum of incentives and aspirations, using the people within it to realize those aspirations.

Nation-states are central registries for everything worth registering in their domains. The nation-state loves order and therefore uses the system of order to explain all the things it has power over.

We have many phenomena of order that define our lives through nation-state aspirations:

Social Security Number: 123-45-6789
Actual address: 1234 Taylor Ave N, Unit #56
Phone Number: (123) 456-7890
Business EIN Number: 123-45-6789

Serialization of people and entities within a nation-state helps the state understand what it is made of. Once a nation-state accounts for everything it controls, it can also start taxing everything.

It's not just about serializing people and their businesses.

According to Seeing like a State, the orderly state-state structure we currently have builds on previous attempts to explain the value of land administered by the taxman. Traditionally, land would be valued and measured according to its ability to produce crops, and the state would employ surveyors to properly value the land based on the value of the crops it could produce. Well, fertile land will be taxed more than dry land because the central accounting body wants its fair share.

Early agricultural accounting systems mapped out land and the types of crops growing on it. A 6-foot wide row of aspens planted every 6 feet for waist plantings will be taxed by the state under tax code 653.723.51. Potatoes are planted every 6 inches, which means 120,000 potatoes can be grown on an acre of land, which will generate $50,000 in tax revenue for the state each year.

The nation-state will work hard to ensure that it accounts for all the values it rules over, knowing that this will result in high taxes for the state.

This is how wild, diverse forests become homogeneous crops of a particular type of tree. The forest becomes a grid of trees suitable for growing wood. The wilderness became orderly pastures with only one crop. The chaotic, unstable land becomes a grid of streets, all with numbers.

Nation-states need to order, number, and count things to optimize their ability to coordinate resources. A nation-state's central registry needs to know about all valuable resources within its control so that taxes can be properly collected and the state developed.

Insight: The cryptocurrency industry has recently encountered this desire of nation-states to tokenize everything and then tax it. The U.S. Treasury's ability to tax is hampered by a lack of oversight of property and ownership within an economy it doesn't control.

That's why they don't like encryption.

Nation-states want to be accountable for everything, which is good for defined system health, but it comes at the expense of individual liberty. Nation-states reducing all people and their properties to a serial number for tax purposes is inhumane and restricts liberty, which is why there is always an argument against government overreach.

That's because if nation-states have their way, the long-term conclusion of nation-state desires might look something like this:

Nation-states are built on central intelligence about their own state and the world around them.

It is seeking to "understand" the world around it, and extract its resources. This concept explains the frequent oppression of indigenous cultures by nation-states. Nomads are hard to tax because you can't find them in specific locations. The resources they produce and consume are ambiguous and difficult to trace because they are produced in a disorderly manner. Nation-states do not know how to value goods produced or consumed “in the wild”, that is, “unaccounted for”.

Indigenous cultures do not inherently blend well with nation-states. Aboriginal people are closer to living in harmony with nature, while nation-states hope to consume the disordered chaos of nature and export orderly civilization. We have seen nation-states confine indigenous cultures to smaller and smaller land areas, as nation-state aspirations began to revolve around non-nation-state cultures to occupy and order the world.

This has become a major flaw in the current social structure of the world and one of the important sources of social stress and inequality globally.

If larger, more just structures of human organization are to emerge, they must remove cultural biases about the legitimacy of identities or objects beneath their domains.

looks like an agreement

Cryptoeconomic systems are able to manage a great deal of responsibility previously borne by nation-states, while retaining the individual's right to express their desires to the maximum extent possible with respect to the world around them.

Ethereum is a new country. A country in the cloud, where bottom-up participation is chosen instead of top-down coercion. Although the mechanism of participation is different, we see that Ethereum also facilitates a similar function of nation-states.

Ethereum also likes things that are ordered and serialized. In fact, if you want anything to exist on Ethereum, you must abide by the laws of the EVM.

Want to build settlements on Ethereum? You need an Ethereum address.
Want an identity on Ethereum? You need an ENS name.
Want to deploy tokens? You need a contract address for the token.
Want to buy NFTs? Your specific Ethereum address will need to interact with a specific contract address, so Ethereum can know which part of the ledger to update.

Ethereum is a protocol for serializing objects into the Metaverse. You can initialize the state of the NFT by deploying smart contract information to Ethereum. Ethereum doesn’t need to hire land surveyors or treasuries. It does not require humans to understand the value of resources in its domain.

Ethereum knows:

Known: address location, amount of ETH, amount of tokens owned, value of tokens owned.

Since Ethereum is an internet protocol, it will never knock on doors for taxation. One of Ethereum's major improvements as an organizational system is the cost-effectiveness of keeping the ledger alive. By eliminating its own material desire for maximum tax extraction, Ethereum only collects the minimum tax revenue (such as transaction fees) needed to maintain the system.

Taxes are paid by those who actually pay the public bill for Ethereum's new national membership: those protecting and updating the global taxonomy

Object Persistence in the Metaverse

Whatever the metaverse is, it requires object persistence.

Items found in the metaverse must behave like the real metaverse. Objects in the metaverse must collide with other objects in the metaverse. If not, are they even objects?

Metaverse objects must be aware of each other's existence. In the digital world, this is only possible if all objects are known by a single source of truth for all known items in the metaverse.

Nation-states assign numbers to the objects they find within their domain, while individuals assign numbers to the objects they create on Ethereum. The process of "tokenization" manifests the object into the metaverse and makes it "knowable" to all other objects in the same plane of existence.

A universe is born.

This is the role of Ethereum as a new nation. Register all objects, and make them interact. In DeFi, we call it "Money Lego", but in NFT, we call it "Metaverse".

"Writing" was invented when humans needed to record ownership of objects in the real world, an invention that started the process of recording history.

The Metaverse will arrive through a similar process. First, we will record the items that exist in it on a universal ledger, then we will build a digital civilization around this single source of truth (we call it the metaverse), the universal ledger is the basic skeleton of the metaverse.

identities are objects

Like all organizational systems before it (religions, nation-states, etc.), Ethereum is made up of people. But so far, it has been difficult for Ethereum to really know who the people who make it up are.

Our human souls and human identities are not something that can be serialized and added to the blockchain. That is something unique to the human space plane in the world, and always will be.

Nation-states don't care about the human spirit; they'll give you an 8-digit social security number and move on. Your identity is given to you by the nation-state. Also, it expires every 6 years; there are consequences if you don't go to your nearest licensing department.

In the Metaverse, you choose who you are.

Ethereum addresses are free for everyone, and an address cannot be linked to a person alone. During my time working on Ethereum, I personally used over 50 Ethereum addresses, many of which were shared with other people.

While my personal activity is largely limited to a handful of addresses, none of the fungible ERC20 tokens passing through these addresses actually link a specific identity to that address.

Currencies and other fungible assets are designed to disassociate owners and units. Currency should be a faceless, apolitical utility that is free from bias and accepts no information about the entities using it.

ERC20 tokens come and go from wallets. Since they are fungible, they lose any form of traceability once they are mixed with other tokens.

My Ethereum address holds a balance of ETH, UNI, AAVE, MKR or any other ERC20 token... just like thousands of other Ethereum addresses. Not differentiated, not unique. In fact, I can sell all tokens from one wallet and repurchase them from another wallet without any connection between the two wallets.

With privacy tools like Aztec coming online, I can send ERC20 tokens from address A to address B without linking the two addresses, making the addresses useless for establishing identities.

The inherent neutrality of ERC20 tokens is a wonderful property necessary to produce a fair and open global financial system, but it fails to create the conditions needed to host a digital nation in the cloud.

This is the power of non-fungible tokens.

My Ethereum address holds Cryptopunk #1118, only one of which. I cannot privately send Cryptopunk #1118 to another wallet. Since there is only one Cryptopunk #1118, the NFT acts as an on-chain object, establishing an identity chain between all Ethereum addresses it touches.

What Ethereum cares about is not the address itself, but the object held by the address.

ERC20 doesn't link identities to Ethereum addresses, but ERC721 does everything for it. As a true metaphysical being, people can travel through the realms of the Metaverse and interact with objects they encounter during their travels.

NFTs are specific, so ownership of NFTs speaks to specific tastes.

Here is my NFT wallet on OpenSea:

There are many wallets, but this one is mine. No other wallet hosts this specific collection of artificially generated objects. NFTs are beginning to cast a shadow of identity behind the private keys that control them.

NFT PFP Avatar Movement

When people add NFTs to their social media profile pictures, it becomes very easy to understand the person behind the address.

ENS names have the same effect. In fact, ENS has made great strides in adding an identity layer to the ENS name itself, rather than just a human-readable name attached to an Ethereum address. I expect ENS to play an important role in aligning identity with Ethereum.

ENS addresses are also NFTs, which contribute their own unique identity layer on top of Ethereum.

Human Serialization on Ethereum

Ethereum doesn’t give you an identity the way a nation-state assigns you a number at birth.

You can choose your identity on Ethereum.

Ethereum doesn't know you're a particular person, and doesn't care. But when you buy an NFT, especially one that is a Web 2 avatar, you choose a specific NFT out of the millions that exist to become a digital representation of yourself.

I chose Cryptopunk #1118 from the contract address 0xb47e3...3BBB, and as a representation of my human taste and human spirit, I chose to attribute the properties of Cryptopunk #1118 to a random Ethereum address.

I choose my Ethereum address, I determine what its identity is. In turn, Ethereum is aware of the existence of specific identities, and it shapes Ethereum by instantiating specific identity attributes within an Ethereum address.

This Ethereum address is unique due to its association with a specific object in the Ethereum Metaverse. It contacts a specific set of unique NFTs, and those non-fungible interactions distinguish it from all other Ethereum addresses that exist in the Metaverse. It has its own traceable path, its own unique story to tell. Only it went its own way, and that made all the difference.

NFTs are how humans become identifiable objects of the state of Ethereum. Not the state of Ethereum, but the memory state of the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Weird, they use the same word!

renaissance of identity

Ethereum identity upends the way we perceive under the nation-state model. On Ethereum, we choose our identity. Instead of giving us an identity in the form of an eight-digit number, Ethereum asks us: what identifies us?

During the Renaissance, a period marked by the rise of individuals from oppressive, top-down religious tyranny, we saw a shift in art from 2D silhouettes and primitive perspectives to 3D representations and photorealistic styles.

I believe the Metaverse offers a similar paradigm shift in terms of identity attributes. We are on the cusp of identity transformation from 2D to 3D.

In the physical world, our identities are largely related to our physical form. In fact, nation-states use skin color, eye color, hair color, gender, and height to register your property into their central database so they can track you.

Check your ID, there it is. The physical properties of your human form have nothing to do with ethereum. Ethereum has no way of knowing the color of your skin, nor does it care. There's nothing stopping some people with certain physical traits from choosing an entirely different digital representation than the DNA they were given at birth.

The practice of mindfulness teaches individuals how to separate their mind from their body and become more aware of their internal processes independently of those of their body. Your human form is overlaid on your human spirit. While these things interact, they are also different.

Given the chance, your human spirit could, in theory, choose to embody a different vessel. Your face is what you see in the mirror. you are you.

From Three Arrows Capital CEO Twitter

Representation of the Digital Metaverse

After debuting on the Fortune cover of ppleasr, I got hooked on my CryptoPunk.

The cover is full of references to crypto Twitter personalities. There are Crypto Dog, Loomdart, Banteg, Tetranode, Santiago Santos, Cobie and more.

As a crypto twitter personality, I'm pretty bummed that I wasn't included on the cover. Every crypto person has the opportunity to be a part of crypto history, but obviously I will never be included in this artwork; my twitter/social media avatar is a picture of myself.

There are no humans in pppleasr's images...just numbers.

That's the point.

The criteria for inclusion in this historic work of art required digital, non-human representations of identity. Pplplear's art is part of the Metaverse, and the human form does not calculate within this plane of reality.

Rest of the Metaverse (loot??)

Identity is the first thing to arrive in the Metaverse, but once we've established ourselves, the next thing is ours. Once humans evolved from nomadic hunter-gatherers to agricultural settlers, we started collecting things.

Again, once we've been able to tackle the Metaverse, it's time to collect items!

metaverse loot

Just this week on Ethereum, we saw something completely new attract a lot of attention and energy. Loot (Adventurers) drops on the 28th, minting 8,000 "bags" each containing 8 different items, each with a rarity level.

On OpenSea, the project looks like this:

Previously, NFTs were all about specific JPEGs. At the heart of the NFT generative art or NFT PFP movement is the purchase of specific JPEGs associated with Ethereum culture.

The JPEG standard is just a specific decoration layer on an object, it doesn't actually contain any decoration information about itself.

So when you buy a loot pack, do you buy a JPEG file which is a list of items?

No.

The JPEG on OpenSea is just a description of the token, not the token itself. These Loot Bags tokens have the property of creating a set of objects and giving those objects unique properties.

OpenSea has not been updated to present the properties of these objects, but sites such as 0xInventory.com are able to express the relevant properties of the loot bag.

The 0xInventory.app website is presenting a higher resolution version of VR as it relates to loot tokens. It uses attributes embedded in tokens to make appearance changes to its front end. The changes are primitive and simple; the text identifying the object has changed color based on rarity.

The changes that 0xInventory.app has brought to the world are only superficial changes that speak to the properties of the tokens themselves, whether they be rare, epic, legendary or common. But this is the first step tokens must take in expressing their properties into the metaverse that emerges around them.

Today, your token changes the color of your own text on the website. tomorrow? The Metaverse reveals specific digital objects into your hand and changes the options available.

booty fork

What does the Loot Project unlock? Probably nothing. This is brand new and no one knows about it. Any 4 days ago (at the time of writing) there are immeasurable risks.

However, since the inception of the Loot Project, spin-off projects have begun to "attach" or "attach" value to the Loot corner of the metaverse.

While this corner of the Metaverse is utterly unstable, this model for establishing how the Metaverse grows has gained precedent. This new model pushes expression to the surface, while value and utility are embedded deeper into the Ethereum protocol.

Some have noticed the potential behind this model. By embedding tokenized properties deeper in the technology stack, you can optimize for maximum appearance choice while establishing a single source of truth for object properties within the Metaverse.

This helps reduce complexity and development costs for developers, while providing freedom, creativity, and expression for users.

ability score

Someone draws up a "ability score" contract and creates "stats" that can be awarded to holders of these loot. They are basically the usual RPG stats found in traditional games.

figure

A contract is to build the first manifestation of a "character" wearing all the loot in a loot bag. This has nothing to do with the original Loot team; it was just initiated by like-minded participants who wanted to add additional functionality to the Loot ecosystem.

field

"Realms" can be minted by loot bag holders, and they're some kind of generated map of an imaginary universe that could theoretically revolve around loot. It's unclear how it will interact with the aforementioned objects.

generating metaverse

The metaverse will be present on the outskirts. Ethereum cannot dictate what the Metaverse should look like, it can only host the valuable objects it owns.

The "Metaverse" cannot be determined by a single source of truth. This is fundamentally not scalable. Instead, the metaverse will be rendered locally according to a local set of rules and properties. However, while the Metaverse will be rendered natively, the valuable objects within that Metaverse will be generic and interoperable.

Composition of the metaverse

Whatever the metaverse is, it will assemble itself into an emergent structure. There will be no specific moment or location of creation, but the metaverse will slowly manifest around us. Metaverse will be a composable universe whose objects are shared and interactive.

In order to become more immersive, the Metaverse will have to show it visually. The computations required to generate decoration layers on the Metaverse would not come from the "blockchain"; it would not be technically feasible. More realistically, metaverses will be rendered by parameters determined by the local rules of the relevant metaverse. The Fortnite metaverse will be represented by Fortnite rules, Axie by Axie and Decentraland by Decentraland.

What makes all this part of the "metaverse" is the shared registry of metaverse objects. Like SMS and TCIP, Metaverse will be built on protocols for identifying objects.

If it matters in the real world, it can be represented by a serialized object in the metaverse. A metaverse may start out as many different and incompatible islands. These separate silos will only confirm some specific objects related to that corner of the "verse", and the only connection to the rest of the metaverse will be through a deep connection structure like Uniswap or OpenSea. Many projects are only related to specific regions of Metaverse, and they will be connected through the underlying liquidity layer of ETH, Uniswap, and OpenSea.

But just as DeFi slowly migrated from disparate applications to a single common financial structure, the Metaverse will stitch itself together through a similar monetary Lego mechanism.

Metaverse will grow by attaching larger and more seamless components of the Metaverse universe to the central foundation of asset and object recognition. It will slowly manifest as a combined alternate dimension of digital existence.

Ethereum is the Economic Foundation of the Metaverse

The details of how the Metaverse actually behaves will depend on the unique rules of a particular corner or niche. However, one thing is certain: the Metaverse requires:

Central Registry of Assets
Tier 1 financial application
economic engine

This is Ethereum. Token Registry. A combination of DeFi applications. Indigenous currencies and economic systems.

Together, these are the foundation of the metaverse economic system.

ethereal desire

We began this essay by addressing the desires of a nation-state and hinting at how its physical nature establishes material desires in the land it controls.

A cryptoeconomic system like Ethereum is a stepwise improvement on the relationship between individuals and the social organizational structure that Ethereum provides. Ethereum does not turn humans into a harvesting farm, but rather a public goods system that optimizes minimal value extraction.

Instead of telling it what it is, the people of Ethereum tell Ethereum what it is. Rather than optimizing for rent-seeking, Ethereum charges fees based on the size of an object (in terms of data) and the complexity of how it interacts with surrounding objects.

state tax

All economic systems that we have seen in history have some sort of tax system. All systems need to maintain self-preservation, the stronger the economy it can finance its own protection, the better the civilization.

EIP 1559 imposes a tax proportional to the use of Ethereum. The more data you put on-chain, the more you pay. Instead of taxing wealth or income, Ethereum taxes your consumption of a public good: block space.

As the Metaverse expands, more and more objects will arrive in the block space of Ethereum, and some of these objects will continue to interact on-chain with other objects, which will require state updates on Ethereum to update The metaverse around the state of the blockspace.

The vast majority of object interactions in the metaverse will be performed via rollups (in a hostile environment, "in the wild") or by trusted databases (in a friendly environment). But even if layer 1 transactions become cheaper and more efficient, this will be largely offset by the Cambrian explosion of metaverse data objects and object-to-object interactions.

Due to Ethereum's monetary policy, the metaverse is immune to cheap gas prices, which creates a safety flywheel around the ecosystem. As the Metaverse grows larger, Ethereum becomes more secure, making the Metaverse itself more secure.

ETH is the metaverse currency

The meme "art priced in ETH" was created during the winter NFT craze of 2020, as everyone noticed that all NFTs were priced in ETH.

Of course, CryptoArt is just the beginning. Naturally, the Metaverse will begin as a high-value speculative work of art before it matures into a more functional and intertwined ecosystem.

While the Metaverse is in its early stages, it will be isolated and separated. The only unifying element of the Metaverse will be the underlying financialization layer, DeFi, which establishes a common economic foundation between all subregions of the Metaverse.

The first shared aspect of the Metaverse will be ETH. ETH is a common currency that unites all the separate silos of the Metaverse on a single liquid asset. While objects in Axie Infinity cannot yet interact with objects in Gods Unchained, they can all be bought or sold for ETH, allowing the value of Axie Infinity to be passed on to Gods Unchained or any other part of the Metaverse.

in conclusion

in conclusion

This image was recently shared with me on Twitter. On the face of it, it illustrates the over-hyped nature of the term "Metaverse," and how it's so non-descriptive that it doesn't actually say anything.

It's just a hyped word that everyone wants to align with.

I think it's a superficial meme, but it's actually a lot deeper than what we've been shown. All technologies are developed towards a unified body. The Metaverse will build itself, and it beckons to those closest to helping it make it happen. The Metaverse is an object that summons its surroundings. It wants to be built, it just needs humans to build it.

Like protocol receivers, the Metaverse is an object that attracts. It rewards those who contribute to it, and more scalable structures find themselves embedded more deeply into the overall structure.

The NFT craze started with JPEGs, but we have to deal with many more file formats before the metaverse can be established. When it comes to how this all will unfold, your guess is as good as mine.

I can only leave you with the same lessons we have learned over and over throughout the encryption process: