Science & Technology

There are several phrases like “metaverse this” and “metaverse that.”
What exactly is the big deal?

Actually, that is quite significant. If you haven’t watched Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi film “Ready Player One,” it is about a dystopian future in which people spend the majority of their time in a virtual reality known as “OASIS,” a utopian society where everything is better than the actual world.

The moral of the narrative is to not waste your greatest years in virtual reality (i.e. the metaverse) while neglecting your real life (“meat-space,” as Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin puts it!)
Despite the doom and gloom and Science Fiction warnings about the metaverse’s ability to damage humanity, it is actually a Very Good Thing.

To begin with, presuming that an open source metaverse is not controlled by a major business (I’m looking at you, Facebook / Meta), a VR place is the most democratic thing you could ever have.
There are no governments in charge of your movements or your virtual life, no corruption, no hidden objectives, and no special interests hired to influence you. It’s about as libertarian as it gets.
You are free to be whatever you choose in the metaverse. NFTs are the “skins” that you buy to represent “you” (or the version of “you” that you choose to portray on any given day).

“Why would you buy an NFT that only exists digitally?” meat-spacers will ask. “It’s worthless” entirely misses the point. More than anything in meat-space, an Instagram or Twitter “blue tick” provides you digital social standing. Although you cannot see a “blue tick,” you immediately assign social standing to the individual who has one. Even though the blue tick is simply digital, you do this in real life.

NFTs and blockchains are both open to the public. This means you can display your “wallet address” if you choose, and everyone in the metaverse can know how much you’re “worth.” Of course, there are security problems, and not everyone wants their net worth to become a target, but it is an intriguing thought nonetheless.

Teleportation? Scotty, beam me up! Why can’t we instantly teleport to another city or country if part of the metaverse is a complete digital copy of places on Earth? There are enough CCTV cameras in major cities across the world that any street corner in a metaverse can be recreated in real time in code. Imagine wandering through New York’s streets one minute and then along Barcelona’s beachfront the next.

If you haven’t seen the latest VR headsets, such as the Oculus Quest 2 or the HTC Vive, you are likely unaware of how far technology has progressed and how close the metaverse is. It’s a completely immersive experience. Imagine what technology will be like in ten or twenty years if it looks like this in the early 2020s. The metaverse will appear to be identical to reality.

In fact, consider the following thought experiment. Maybe we’re all living in the year 3000, connected into a virtual reality machine, and we’ve forgotten (or taught ourselves to forget) that this isn’t our true timeline. We may be students on a virtual reality field trip to experience living in the year 2020. (In the same way that you might visit a museum to learn about medieval living). When we die during our “lifetime,” we are transported back to the year 3000, when we first plugged in. After the history lesson, board the spaceship to return home for dinner.

According to Elon Musk, there is a non-zero chance we are all living in a simulation. Perhaps the Matrix is more real than we realize.

The metaverse is on its way, ushering in a golden age of human discovery and growth. CryptoCrewz will have a significant presence in the metaverse. I look forward to seeing you there.