Tag Archives: Metaverse

The mischaracterization of the Metaverse

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“The Metaverse is already here.” That’s the insight that never really occurred to me until I heard Mustafa Suleyman, Google’s Deep Mind Co-founder, on The Diary of a CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett.

“You know, the last three years people have been talking about Metaverse, Metaverse, Metaverse. And the mischaracterization of the Metaverse was that it’s over there. It was this like virtual world that we would all bop around in and talk to each other as these little characters, but that was totally wrong. That was a complete miss-framing. The Metaverse is already here. It’s the digital space that exists in parallel time to our everyday life. It’s the conversation that you will have on Twitter or, you know, the video that you’ll post on YouTube, or this podcast that will go out and connect with other people. It’s that meta-space of interaction, you know, and I use meta to mean ‘beyond this space’, not just that weird other, ‘over there’, space that people seem to point to.”

We are already in the Metaverse, I’m in the same room as my daughter right now. She’s watching a movie, I’m writing on my phone. We are entered into parallel universes, physically together but disconnected. We are both in spaces, on screens, beyond the physical space we are in.

Before hearing this quote, I thought of the Metaverse as something in the future, like the ‘fitless humans‘ from the movie WALL•E.

We are already there. We have iPads babysit (or at least occupy the attention of) our kids. We rage about stupid things on Twitter and YouTube. We share content with people we have never met, and they share content with us. We are influenced by influencers. We buy things from virtual stores. We play games with people in different time zones.

The Metaverse is already here creating parallel experiences to the ones we physically experience… It’s not something we are heading towards. We are already living a good part of our lives, ‘in spaces beyond the physical space we are in‘. Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest through the trees, or in this case the spaces beyond our screens.

We don’t really understand

We don’t really understand exponential growth. It’s too hard to comprehend because when we look at growth, we tend to focus on what we’ve seen already, and project forward, but what has already happened is always less significant in length or size than what is still to come. So when we compare what has happened already to what is still to come, we are not comparing equal things.

Fold a piece of paper in half 6 times. How thick do you think the stack would be? Let’s have some fun and look at the folding paper challenge:

It was an accepted belief that folding a piece of paper in half more than 8 times was impossible. On 27 January 2002, high school student, Britney Gallivan, of Pomona, California, USA, folded a single piece of paper in half 12 times and was the first person to fold a single piece paper in half 9, 10, 11, and 12 times. The tissue paper used was 4,000 ft (1,219 m; 0.75 miles) long. ~ GuinnessWorldRecords.com

So she needed a 4,000 foot, (1,219 metres) long piece of paper to achieve this. It’s easy to look at this image of her folded paper and figure out how big it was at 11 folds and before that 10 folds, by halving the amount once then twice. But what if she were to fold the paper more times? How many more times would this image represent?

This image represents folding the paper just 3 more times… a total of just 15 folds.

At 23 folds this would be about a kilometre high (3,280 feet). At 30 folds, you would be entering space. 42 folds gets you to the moon. The 51st fold would get you to the sun. Beyond that it doesn’t matter because our brains won’t truly appreciate the scale anyway.

So I can see the difference that folding a piece of paper just 6 times (64 pieces of paper high) to 12 times (the first image of Brittany above) looks like, but I really struggle to extrapolate from this that 24 folds would be 2 kilometres high.

So when we look at things like technological advancements, we don’t really see well into the future. When I bought the 16k adapter for my Commodore VIC 20 computer to get me to a whopping 36k of memory, I could not fathom the idea that I’d one day be buying 2 Terabytes of memory to store photos that were 8 megabytes large. And I’ll have an even harder time imagining what kind of data I’ll be storing 10 or 20 years from now.

Watch out Metaverse here we come! What does this mean? It means that in 20 years we’ll look back at the technology we have right now in the same way someone who lived 160 years ago would look at our technology today.

That’s mind blowing!

Market volatility

Three years ago I put a little bit of money into cryptocurrency and then the market took a huge dive. It was hard to watch this ‘investment’ dive to 25-30% of what I put in. But it wasn’t like I put in more than I could afford to lose, and I didn’t panic and sell at the bottom. I held on… or as they say in crypto, HODL (a term started with the word HOLD being written with a typo, and now standing for Hold On for Dear Life).

Late last year my investment jumped back up to break even, and then soared, and I learned my first lesson about investing, and that is dollar cost averaging. If I had not put the investment in all at once, but instead had put money in monthly, I would have done so much better. The reality is that this strategy works better than 90-95% of investment strategies. So, unless investing is the thing you do, your best strategy is to put a small amount of money in every month, no matter what the market does. The volatility works to your advantage, and no one knows when the market is going to dip.

Last night was one of those dips. Wham, 20-25% down! It’s sad, but I bet many new investors lost a lot of money and sold out when they felt the pain of watching their investment sink. For me, I’ve seen this before, and my small investment is doing better than if I had put that money into an RRSP or Tax Free Savings Account. But I’ll be honest and say that for a couple years, it didn’t seem like this.

What’s interesting is that adoption of cryptocurrency is growing, the use-cases for them are incredible. Smart contracts (that cut out expensive bank and lawyer fees), back-end tracking of supply chains, and decentralized borrowing are a few places that blockchain technology are literally ‘taking over’. Also, while many people struggle with the idea of NFT’s (Non Fungible Tokens) these are revolutionary in the way an artist or creator can gain profit from the resale of their work. And the Metaverse is something that will grow and holds amazing potential… and huge profits in the multi-billion dollar gaming market.

What’s really going to change the crypto market is the speed of adoption. If you own cryptocurrency now, you are about 2-3% of the world’s population. It took about 12 years to get to this percentage. It will probably take less than 2 more to get to 5%. Three years ago I had to drive into Vancouver to put money into crypto, and because my investment was quite small, I had to pay a premium at over 5%. Now I use Netcoins, (full disclosure, that’s a referral link), and it’s a simple e-transfer, and a 1.5% premium on the purchase. Easy. And everyone has seen adds for Crypto.com, where you can buy, stake (lock in and earn interest), and even spend (with a prepay visa) crypto.

Both the interest and access have opened up dramatically, and the adoption of cryptocurrencies is about to explode. But with this comes even more volatility. With this comes the high speculation gambles and the fear selling when the market does what it did last night. And cryptocurrency is risky. It’s not a normal thing to watch the volatility of 10-25% rises and dips and think, ‘easy come, easy go’. But I enjoy looking into the projects and investing a little bit in them. I’m not planning on taking any profits out until after I retire, and I’m not putting enough in to make a difference in my day to day living and spending habits. So the volatility isn’t much more than entertainment. Though I will admit, the appeal to put a bit more money in when I see a big dip like this is pretty strong.

One thing that I fear is that a lot of younger people, with less disposable income are jumping into meme coins (popularized coins that only serve to be traded with little other purpose). These are high risk, and susceptible to ‘pump and dump‘ schemes where they simultaneously buy causing a jump in price, and get people excited to catch the ride up, then those behind the scheme dump their coins on the market taking massive profits at the top, and leaving everyone else holding the coin at a much lower value.

A 20-year old thinking long term and dollar cost averaging, will do well. A similar person seeking massive profits will end up losing their investment 4 out of 5 times, but they will know someone who was the 1 out of 5 profit-maker and think that they can do the same. Betting on short term market volatility is risky and will cause a lot of people pain. Where as, knowing that market volatility is profitable over the long term and dollar cost averaging is what smart investors do.

It’s a simple formula where risk over a shorter time can lead to greater profits but will more likely lead to greater losses, and risk over a longer time might not get the huge gains, but it will reduce the risk of loss: Invest a small amount, repeat, and HODL. The next lesson is when to take profits… I have a strategy, but I’m still trying to learn more from people a lot smarter than me.

———-

(Disclaimer: I’m not a financial advisor and I don’t play one on the internet… this is not financial advice.)

A metaphor for meta

By now most people have heard about Facebook’s plan to open up The Metaverse to everyone: a virtual environment where we interact and engage in a digital world.

Back at the start of September I wrote Future Tech: Prescription Glasses Metaphor, and shared how wearable technology will enhance us. In it I said, “The future I shared above is a future with a metaphorical 30/20 vision. It is the ability to see and feel things that people today can not see or feel without augmentation… and this will be the new version of 20/20 vision.”

Essentially, if you aren’t augmenting your sight with added (meta) data from the world, normal vision would be like you are walking around with bad vision, missing out on what everyone else can see. The Metaverse is a bit different. It isn’t augmentation of reality, it is an alternate reality, albeit a virtual one. It is a world unto itself, with locations to visit and items to consume and purchase.

There are a lot of movies about people being trapped in a virtual world or a video game, this is a space people choose to go to. It has all the trappings of the present world, but without the crowds, pollution, and effort to commute to different places. But while I haven’t read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash that first coined the Metaverse, from what I understand it’s quite dystopian, with capitalism reigning supreme and the rich controlling the virtual world. Sure, it will produce some new winners, the early adopters who understand how to build and capitalize in this new frontier. However, the rich will also do very well, and be the early buyers who build the infrastructure for profit. Facebook will profit the most, with a younger generation that was a demographic that they were losing.

It’s going to happen. It’s going to be a space everyone finds value visiting. From moviegoers, sitting in a virtual theatre with the biggest screen they’ve ever seen right ‘in front of’ their eyes. To birthday parties of friends in other parts of the world. To business meetings. To music concerts and live performances. To actual video games where you spend both time and money living in an alternate reality.

Except it won’t just be a vacation land and escape. It will be a temporary happy pill for some, and a permanent place of work for others. It will not bring happiness for most, it will only extend the rat race of the physical world into a virtual world.


if this feels like a dystopian outlook, it’s not because of the inability for this new Metaverse to be a great place, but rather because those who build it and first explore it won’t be there to make it an ideal place to enjoy, they will be there to make it a market to gain profit and power.

Welcome to the virtual rat race.