[charlesju]

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.

[abeppu]

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?

[TillE]

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.

[gfodor]

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.)

[woodruffw]

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.

[gfodor]

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.

[woodruffw]

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.

[roywiggins]

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.

[gfodor]

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.

[charlesju]

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.

[gfodor]

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.

[abeppu]

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?

[gfodor]

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.

[abeppu]

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?

[gfodor]

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.

[TimJRobinson]

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.

[roywiggins]

> The virtual world 1 is way more interesting

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?