This Week in the Metaverse for December 12, 2022

0 00:00:10,000 --> 00:00:45,000 Script: December 5, 2022 1 00:00:46,000 --> 00:01:21,000 Hi, it’s Mike Stiles and this is This Week in the Metaverse, your weekly newscast that keeps you up to date on everything that isn’t real, and yet is. It’s December 12th. Let’s find out what happened in and out of the metaverse this week. 2 00:01:22,000 --> 00:01:57,000 It always sucks when you’re in a beauty pageant and don’t win. All those baton twirling lessons for nothing and you have no good answer for how to save the world. Well, there’s an annual beauty contest for words, Oxford’s Word of the Year. This is the word that the fine folks at Oxford think had the biggest impact on society and culture over the past year and despite listenership to this podcast, metaverse was a prime candidate. But…it came in second. It had to pretend to look happy for the actual winner which was the term “Goblin mode.” Goblin mode first started seeing usage on Twitter way back in 2009, but it was only recently the world embraced it as apparently the desired way to live. It means “a type of behavior which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.” There are a lot more goblins out there than usual. I think I’d rather be an ogre than a goblin. It wasn’t even close really. "Metaverse" got beat in a landslide, and the reason was it was felt the word was only used in specialist contexts. That makes me a specialist. But usage did increase almost fourfold from 2021. Words associated with the metaverse also did pretty well, including web3, virtual, crypto, and NFT, which won word of the year last year by Oxford’s rival dictionary publisher Collins. 3 00:01:58,000 --> 00:02:33,000 Guess who doesn’t want government to regulate the metaverse closely. The company that’s almost literally bet the farm on the metaverse, which is Meta. The company is urging policymakers to hold off on creating new rules governing the metaverse. And by urging, that usually means they’re buying policymakers off in whatever way they can. Meta’s Facebook, as well as other big tech social platforms, already have special protection from congress from accountability as they exercise editorial control over the content on those platforms. But Meta doesn’t want to get hassled in the metaverse either. Here’s their argument. They say a lot of the world’s existing laws and regulations are going to also apply to things that happen in the metaverse, and regulators could “stymie innovation” if they try to make a whole new regulatory scheme for it. That may fall on deaf ears though. Lawmakers are increasingly think it’s a good idea to rein in tech companies, especially ones that just slipped out of their control like Twitter. The U.S. is actually behind a little bit. The EU wants the metaverse scrutinized and the bloc’s online speech rules might get extended to the metaverse. Most regulators around the world are still trying to figure out what to do about crypto. 4 00:02:34,000 --> 00:03:09,000 Now I’ll fix it so that you don’t know what to believe with two stories that say exactly the opposite thing. First, a survey by Capgemini shows more than three out of four customers want to carry out transactions in the metaverse. Overall, a lot more people are showing interest in it. Not enough to win word of the year, but still. Their interest is driven by convenience. Apparently, nobody wants to go to physical locations anymore or interact with real human beings. And why would we? We’re goblins. Businesses are interested in it too because hey, that saves a lot of money if you don’t have to exist in the real world. If you believe this survey, 70% of organizations think those immersive experiences will boost the customer experience. 93% of interviewees are interested in virtual reality and of those, 51% are ready to use it metaverse as soon as it’s accessible to them. And that’s the problem according to Capgemini’s immersive experiences offer leader Charlton Monsanto. He says accessibility needs to be easier and privacy issues need to get handled as well. What do people want to do in the metaverse? 43% want to interact with family and friends, just not like, for real. 39% want to interact with colleagues. 33% want to game and 28% were interested in commercial activities. 5 00:03:10,000 --> 00:03:45,000 Now for the opposing story. Ryan Morrison at TechMonitor reports on a global survey by law firm Gowling, WLG that shows British people pretty much don’t care about the metaverse. They care about soccer, which sucks having just lost to France. Only 37% in this survey said they’d take part in a virtual ecosystem. And that’s seen as a problem because the worry is businesses will miss out on the benefits. I mean, people from all over the world engaging with each other in an immersive environment just might be the way we work in the future, like it or not. Only a fifth of UK employees said they’d consider engaging with co-workers in the metaverse and 23% might use it for events like conferences and concerts. 10% in the UK have no interest at all in the metaverse and 20% don’t think it will ever become mainstream. China’s a different story. Twice as many consumers in China would take part in the metaverse compared to UK citizens and globally, three-quarters understood the metaverse. In the UK only 2% of respondents had a “complete understanding” and 40% had no understanding. 43% in the UAE are excited about the metaverse compared to 8% in the UK. But like the Capgemini conclusion, this survey pointed out that these numbers could change drastically once the metaverse becomes real, accessible, and security issues are worked out. 6 00:03:46,000 --> 00:03:57,000 If you ever wanted to be a landlord, maybe you should try it out in the metaverse first. Because Decentraland is now going to let you do that. If you own virtual land in Decentraland as an NFT, you can rent it out, with renters paying you every day using MANA, the platform’s main crypto. You can find tenants in what the company says is a secure, trustless process. Because no trust is what the future is going to be founded on. You set the cost and duration of the lease, then when the lease expires you decide if you want to reclaim the property or put it up for rent again. And no late night phone calls to fix a leaky toilet! No one using your basement as a meth lab! Decentraland offers up a potential use case for why you would want to do this. Say you’ve bought and opened a virtual nightclub. You can rent it out to virtual DJs to hold a rave or a dance bubble bath or whatever the kids are doing these days. The Decentraland Foundation stores the owner and tenant data off-chain and on the Ethereum blockchain. And by the way, land in Decentraland is valued pretty high compared to other places like The Sandbox and NFT Worlds. The average cost of a parcel is $2,380. 7 00:03:58,000 --> 00:04:09,000 Still not sure why anyone would or should buy crypto? Ana Nicenko of Finbold tells us what the founder of Etherium, Vitalik Buterin, thinks are the five most important uses of it. At least the ones he’s most excited about. 1) An alternative to money. This is especially attractive in countries with crazy high inflation. We’re looking at you Argentina. But even if there’s no inflation, he thinks crypto is way more convenient than rolled up Benjamins. 2) Blockchains are valuable for identity applications. Like the Sign In With Ethereum (SIWE) standard, which lets you log into websites through Google or Facebook without giving those companies “access to your private info or the ability to lock you out of your account.” 3) More trustworthy voting. By publishing votes on the blockchain, people have a way independent of the voting system to make sure their vote got included. But the votes are encrypted, which preserves privacy. 4) Keeping decentralized finance simple, getting it down to a few applications that are particularly valuable. And 5) Decentralized governance through decentralized autonomous organizations, basically smart contracts that represent a structure of ownership or control over an asset or process. The benefits there are protection from internal and external attackers, more opinions from more diverse voices at different scales, and better efficiencies. 8 00:04:10,000 --> 00:04:21,000 That’s all we have for you this week. Ask a friend if they’ve heard this show, they’ll tell you no, then tell them they should, and we’ll be back next week. 9 00:04:22,000 --> 00:04:26,000 In this short episode you’ll learn: 10 00:04:27,000 --> 00:04:31,000 If the metaverse won word of the year. 11 00:04:32,000 --> 00:04:36,000 Who really, really doesn’t want the government to regulate the metaverse too much. 12 00:04:37,000 --> 00:04:41,000 Who’s excited about the metaverse and understands it 13 00:04:42,000 --> 00:04:46,000 Why the UK isn’t and doesn’t 14 00:04:47,000 --> 00:04:51,000 Which metaverse lets you rent out your virtual land 15 00:04:52,000 --> 00:05:00,000 What the founder of Ethereum thinks the top uses of crypto are