The Path Towards an Open Metaverse - TOKEN2049 London 2022

hi everybody um second opportunity I've had to be on this stage so thank you for everybody who's made that uh possible I'm going to sit down in a second for this fireside chat obviously slightly unusual one I guess uh my first question is is is two um Mr Punk 6529 can you hear me I can hear just fine thank you there you go we are we are live and we can chat um so um obviously it's it's slightly strange introducing someone who's um um Anonymous and and also not present um uh but um maybe uh what would be interesting would be if you could describe a little bit how you manage to um uh make this journey to create this you know Persona in the in the metaverse um and and indeed um I guess amongst a few different things you know attract institutional investors to come and back you in different ways and invest alongside you um in nfts in art but all of different varieties but also in um uh projects that are you know pivotal to the open metabus what your kind of you know the beginning of this narrative about what your mission around the open metaverse um is and I think if anybody does some reading around um you know from from Twitter for example around pics punk6529 you'll see um that you know he's I think enlightened in as much as if he realizes that if we're going to achieve such a a lofty ambition as to build the open metaverse it's going to require uh that we um we ferment a kind of a passion for the Open Sea uh which is a fragment of a quote from Antoine de sanray um and and so I think that's the level of of his ambition so I just love him to expand on how he's managed to pull all of that off whilst uh remaining behind the scenes so over to you for your own introduction sure great thank you uh and thank you very much for having me let me start with what the goal is and then I think it can work backwards to why I use a pfp because I think that they're not they're not independent from each other they have to do with each other I've been in crypto for about a decade now and while we've had many technical accomplishments and while we have also had many monetary accomplishments the number on the whole and over time has gone up the part that to me we have not succeeded as well as one would have hoped is actually building decentralized infrastructure we the industry on the whole works on centralized infrastructure something we've all seen over the last few days right this is the chaos of the last two days will be credited to decentralized crypto networks that will be used by people who do not like cryptocurrency to say look this is what we were saying but there was nothing decentralized crypto Network about it right it was just another centralized entity and everything was all the feelings there came from centralization the reason I like the case that this happened while people there's one the small percentage of people one two percent who might be interested in the completely theoretical reasons why I should host your own node and have your own self-solving wallet in practice most people choose convenience and not just most people I don't mean the proverbial retail most crypto heavy people use convenience many many serious crypto people are using centralized infrastructure and what I realized a couple of years ago was that nfts were different nfts because of their composability and interactivity tended to run natively on shame as the first point and secondly because they were interesting fun and application layer above the network people liked using them there was a motivation for someone who might have not been bothered to set up a Bitcoin wallet to figure out how to use them at a mask to buy good night everyone I realized well that's that's really interesting because we've never seen that before right like technology matures technology becomes consumer ready when you talk about the applications of Technology more than the technology itself right Instagram uses python but nobody says use Instagram because they use Python they use Instagram because it's interesting um to take pictures of yourself at the beach likewise crypto punks use the ethereum consensus model but I didn't buy this particular crypto Punk because of some of you on proof of work or proof of stake I know exactly how it works but I bought it because I thought it was cool right that was what I actually bought it and so I said oh well this is really interesting and it's not just something that's interesting for cartoon profile pictures nfts can be a generic container a generic transportation technology for oh digital intangibles which is a gigantic category right it's about an 80 trillion dollar intention was an 80 trillion dollar existing category and then over time um non-fungible physical Goods but the first one being the most important they said well that's interesting we have possibly we interoperable system to foundationally build an open metaphor so what's a metaverse a metaverse is simply is simply the internet with better visualization thousands of applications in today on the web and time augmented reality and there's this pathway in between so this was my thought process this is where I was let's say March of 2021 and I launched my six five tonight shoot anonymously for two reasons the first reason is well I do I believe we will have digital identities in the metaverse and will those identities necessarily be your LinkedIn photo yeah I believe that right and there's no reason it has to be a LinkedIn photo for some people it can be it's absolutely fine well if that's true I like to learn by doing and that will let me do let me let me start in this model and see if what it feels like and then the other part was I wanted to check the quality of my ideas quite frankly I had an existing presence of some type in on Twitter and the crypto Community what does that look I don't want to use them I want to start fresh I want to start with literally zero followers and start creating things and saying if I was right because if I'm right it's a very big idea I haven't seen anyone quite frame it this way and I wanted to see if the idea would stand on its merits without any pluses or minuses or distractions from anything I had previously done so that was kind of the background of how it started let me take a pause there so many questions I don't say well how has that worked or not worked or it's been difficult or easy yeah so so what I've taken away from that is that I think we can agree at some high level um that we can see some calamities that can occur uh you know economically politically um you know privacy breaches personally from you know Central uh digital utilities and and so therefore we there's that kind of there's a visceral emotional uh desire and justification for moving away from that and fraud to something that is open and decentralized and that as as we contemplate um that move to the the metaverse we perhaps don't want it to be the metaverse we want it to be the open uh verse of some type um uh but I have and and also I think we've started there you've out sort of that lay out the way in which you know there's more to nfts than meets the eye that nfts uh themselves can represent a form of digital identity in this open verse but I have a couple of questions related to those well first actually I want to kind of poll the audience here um who here actually owns an nft let's start with that so I would have said about 50 of the audience who here uses their nft in the manner that you know this particular Punk does to represent themselves in a in a sort of social media world to some degree who does that yeah so probably about 10 I I would have thought so I think that's useful to uh you know context for us so I think what I think would be interesting if you could expand upon is that notion of um it's not just about art when you come to sort of pfps and obviously there's many other types of nfts as well you could talk about that um it's about identity how that how is that going to evolve and you know are we ready for that are there bits of infrastructure missing interoperability and so forth and then on the motivation side again we can have this visceral motivation for making the shift but quite often you know people are incredibly um complacent about issues like that nobody worries that the you know the barn door is open till the horse is bolted about getting an insurance or whatever so how do we find motivations how do we find um something will help us actually ensure that you know meta does not co-opt the metaverse and we don't tend as you've written by default to a centralized metaverse in the future so two questions expand on decentralized identity and how can we actually avoid that calamity because there are different questions the I think one message that I would say in my experience now a year and a half using 659 as an identity is I think one day all of you are going to do it I don't think it is that radical we've had pseudonymous authors in the past where we had bulletins in the past bottom boards in the past right to go back to the 1990s people would log into what more than wouldn't necessarily put their full name and their social security number right they might have just a username this is the same concept and it is very interesting to me because about a couple of months before I started no a few months before I started I had read all this Eastern of Awesomes blog post I think I said in the future we're all going to have different online and on-shade identities and I literally thought to myself why would I want such a thing it's fine and now it's obvious why would one system right it's not even and it's not something that's very specific to me there are different parts of my life and different parts of my life you know on Facebook my high school friends can find out that I eat pizza and that's fine I think it's basically completely irrelevant to anyone in this audience right if someone here follows me on Twitter why do they care that I had pizza why do they need to know them right but for some and my high school friends I'm pretty sure don't need or want to listen 27 times a day about the open metaverse right and so this ability to um use different identity sort of information I think it's perfectly normal as perfect Asian afford I think more people will do it over time does it break can you really do it all the way through not really right there are certain things that might be hard to change obviously taxes and legal items those can't I can't file my 1040 with hunks at five to nine right bank accounts same things right so is most of the infrastructure for six five to nine on chain yes do we have normal Fiat infrastructure of course do those who live in the normal world yes but even things that are don't need to be this way many services look for real names they look for telephone numbers I end up for sometimes just not signing up for them or having a team members of them and as more of those become web 35 where you can sign up with a Fair one or any other to learn I think it's going to be better and I actually don't think you know a lot of people say oh this should Anonymous how do we know how do we just it's a higher level of trust that level of trust do you have that any account on any social media platform is genuine also zero right we're having this big fight now on Twitter and certainly it doesn't transport across social media accounts whereas I have a persistent reputation as on six five to nine at 6529.e from there on specific ethereum addresses and if I use them on a wide variety of social media applications gaming applications Financial applications someone can pull together a very consistent and career in history of this person acts in a repeatable manner and I think they can and I think that's what's interesting they don't specifically need to know what's on my driver's license right and it is a higher level of trust than what we have today with social media accounts and a much simpler model than trying to guess who is who right I think it's a harder model so let's put that as the decentralized identity topic right on the do people not take the right steps until it's too late yes this is the normal case right the normal case is that there has been both at an individual level at an organizational level and at a governmental level a complete and utter failure to understand what change between web one and web 2. web one has nothing to do with cryptocurrency it is decentralized and interoperable I can use SMTP to send an email and so can anyone else in the world and there's not one person in charge of email and there's no one in charge of checking if every single person's emails are correct or incorrect and there's a wide variety of centralized providers that offer email Services of which I use many of them and that's absolutely fine because there are no switching costs very limited switching costs to email and so people can switch until everyone even the centralized providers more or less behave the same is true of websites of HTM Allen tcpip and web servers it is decentralized it is standards based we lost that in web 2. we lost that with Twitter and Facebook but also the app stores and what have you and all modern internet activity runs through five or six firms this is bad for Innovation obviously it creates rents thinking you know that people think that it might be reasonable that Apple takes 30 or Facebook wants to take 40 five percent of Revenue in their metaverse product that's this is clear rent seeking and it has led to societal disruption you know the United States has been on a two-year very intense argument on who gets a Twitter account and apparently that answer changes based on who's the CEO of Twitter but that is a very if you think that Twitter is effectively the short messaging protocol of the internet in the English language this is a very strange architecture that we get we decide in the English-speaking world who gets to send short message online based on who the CEO of Twitter is why should that matter one bit Elon is just doesn't matter at all I don't think anyone in this audience can name who the product manager is of Gmail and that's correct who cares that's an issue for Google right it's not an issue of national importance and so it is true we have walked into a centralized world without thinking about it too much I think it is generally unhealthy and then the question is well how do you reverse that right and arguably what I'm going to say is you have to win on consumer experience and on fun you can't just lecture people I've tried lecturing people when I say these things people look at you like you're strange what's the problem 6509 my Facebook account's fine what's the issue right I go there and I post pictures of my kid what's the problem why is this a problem it doesn't seem like a large societal problem so the interesting thing about nfts which are very different than all prior encies is they can actually transport a whole and express a whole range of social activities yes Collectibles yes art yes gaming objects yes arbitrary additional objects yes social organizations you can actually model and express a social organization with nfts and so you'll call people in not because of some deep theoretical uh discussion about internet architecture just like people didn't use email because someone explained to them that SMTP is decentralized and therefore it's a good reason to use email people used email because the Italian music they sent an email from themselves to someone else this is the same thing nfts have practical consumer level about our organizational level utility that might bring people naturally on shape something like that is my mental model here so um uh I have to make a confession which some of this is very hard for me to hear I think because the audio is tuned that way rather than this way but but um but I'm doing my best to follow um the one thing that you've written about actually uh which I think Echoes something that um you know our friend evil Harari is written about which is that you know we only really get something achieved um uh through our human ability to to believe in a fictional future to to follow a a narrative a story a dream or you know perhaps to be part of a meme um and you know people them you know these virtual identities effectively coalesce around these memes you you so you've written and that we can perhaps create new organizational structures as a result and so before we perhaps sort of try and finish off with uh how you might entreaty the individuals in the audience and Beyond to do their part uh if they believe in it um in this in trying to preserve of the openness of the metaverse can you expand a little bit a bit on that that concept of memes um as sort of amassed you know individuals in the metaverse and how those are important more important even than that digital land that we're we're building sure um I believe this concept of intercept of the inter-subjective of myths as I describes it is in fact very important it is I believe the Apex object of Any Human Society people will die for the American flag let's say right um Obama said yes we can Donald Trump said make America great again they sound like little catchphrases and each one of those catchphrases gave them access to nuclear weapons just do it in the swoosh creates a tremendous amount of incremental cash flow for Nike right so in all human societies above 100 200 people let's listen to you all quite directly need some intersubjective framework to organize themselves the very fancy ways to call them you know intersubjective he call he popularized in the calls them myths memes are kind of the same thing and what's interesting in the concept of that's how I use memes you can actually own transport compose the meme directly the intersubjective myth directly it's a weird mental lead by Grant you right and it's one of those mental leaps the same way that Bitcoin was a mental lead and nfts are meant to leap and CC's zero public domain nfts are meant to leap but I think it is a correct mental leap we have you know there was a time before mortgage-backed Securities that you could not trade mortgages they were sitting in your they were sitting in your local uh Community Banks uh filing cabinet in effect here we have the ability to directly own monetize transport what I think ultimately will be the Apex officers of society and there can be a way in that way to organize humans organize society and drive the type of change with my weapons what it's going to be depends on the person right there's no right answer depends on their objective and big person and the uh organization so I'll say this uh I don't think it's gonna be a surprise to anyone but it's unlikely that there are a few people more bullish on how much impact nfts could have over the coming decades I think very foundational technology they're a foundational technology they're a horizontal technology I think people should not get caught up on do they like this ape or do they like this gaming object that doesn't matter very much right that's just an application of a broader technology that allows us to directly own manipulate Network compose arguably the most important objects in the modern society which are the intangibles brilliant thank you so much unfortunately we are um out of time um so it just leads me to thank you very much indeed uh Punk 6529 for joining us at token 2049 and um I hope everybody give a big round of applause and I hope that we get to continue the conversation here or in the metaverse thank you so much for having me appreciate it