A Manifesto for the Metaverse
tiltingatwindmills.dev
A Manifesto for the Metaverse
1–10 of 15 posts
Re: A Manifesto for the Metaverse
#2> With blockchain, users can maintain a consistent identity across the metaverse simply by verifying their wallet address, which nobody else would have access to.
This can be done with boring old encryption keys and signatures, not stupid blockchain needed. Even then it doesn't solve the avatar problem. If I make an avatar that looks just like someone else (or their avatar) it doesn't matter if people can verify someone's identity. I can effectively impersonate anyone I want if I can freely adjust an avatar. Unless you can manage to create a truly effective "avatar hash" there's no way to keep me from using someone else's model.
Re: A Manifesto for the Metaverse
#3A disappointing article that’s not a manifesto in any sense. The author doesn’t seem interested in exploring prior art at all, and there’s plenty starting from VRML which was briefly the hype around 1996.
Crypto claims are repeated without criticism. For example:
“With blockchain, users can maintain a consistent identity across the metaverse simply by verifying their wallet address, which nobody else would have access to.”
How do you know address 0x381638eef881 is the Jane Doe who went to your high school? It’s not intrinsically a better identifier than janedoe31@gmail.com.
You can’t expect people to have a single wallet address all their lives — keys get lost, etc. And if you need a third party to provide an identity layer, well, that’s just another Facebook. (Which of course the VCs hope that they’ll be the ones to fund.)
Re: A Manifesto for the Metaverse
#4The first lines of the article actually tell most of the story:
> What is the Metaverse? Wired tried to figure it out recently and the results were inconclusive. Where is the metaverse? How do we log in to it? Nobody knows!
I read the article and only came away with 'we don't know anything, we use buzzwords to imagine solutions for problems that could be solved without buzzword tech, and call for let's build it'.
To me metaverse sounds like a bubble of hot marketing and PR air.
Re: A Manifesto for the Metaverse
#5> With blockchain, users can maintain a consistent identity across the metaverse simply by verifying their wallet address, which nobody else would have access to. This can be done with boring old encryption keys and signatures, not stupid blockchain needed. Even then it doesn't solve the avatar problem. If I make an avatar that looks just like someone else (or their avatar) it doesn't matter if people can verify some…
You barely need crypto. Ticket authentication would be enough.
Re: A Manifesto for the Metaverse
#6The manifesto for the metaverse may be found by consulting my HN profile.
Re: A Manifesto for the Metaverse
#7> With blockchain, users can maintain a consistent identity across the metaverse simply by verifying their wallet address, which nobody else would have access to. This can be done with boring old encryption keys and signatures, not stupid blockchain needed. Even then it doesn't solve the avatar problem. If I make an avatar that looks just like someone else (or their avatar) it doesn't matter if people can verify some…
> there's no way to keep me from using someone else's model
Indeed it seems to me desirable that I could use someone else's model. The obvious solution to spoofing identity is "press a button to view metadata of what I'm looking at"; the apparent visual world is hardly the only layer of reality we need to experience in VR.
Re: A Manifesto for the Metaverse
#8Feels like it misses the point. The "openness" of the web meant that anyone that could use a text editor could have a website and everybody could access it (and most of it worked perfectly if users accessed it asynchronously). The barriers to having your own coherent shared 3D experience a lot higher (and the entities that do it well aren't particularly interested in opening it up to everybody else)
And of course the blockchain still feels like a solution in search of a problem. A blockchain isn't a solution to the problem of "anyone can design their avatar to look like anything they want" because the blockchain isn't a design restriction, and if you've got entities deciding that only the owner of a particular token can have a particular style of costume, that looks quite a lot like centralisation.
Re: A Manifesto for the Metaverse
#9A disappointing article that’s not a manifesto in any sense. The author doesn’t seem interested in exploring prior art at all, and there’s plenty starting from VRML which was briefly the hype around 1996. Crypto claims are repeated without criticism. For example: “With blockchain, users can maintain a consistent identity across the metaverse simply by verifying their wallet address, which nobody else would have acces…
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Re: A Manifesto for the Metaverse
#10A disappointing article that’s not a manifesto in any sense. The author doesn’t seem interested in exploring prior art at all, and there’s plenty starting from VRML which was briefly the hype around 1996. Crypto claims are repeated without criticism. For example: “With blockchain, users can maintain a consistent identity across the metaverse simply by verifying their wallet address, which nobody else would have acces…
Yes, it takes a remarkable amount of mental gymnastics to reconcile decentralized transparent information and the Facebook corporation.