In 1991, the first-ever website went live. It’s just a page with some text on it. Then, a couple of years later, a video went live on another website. After a few years, you have YouTubers with a wider reach than an entire news outlet giant. Not it comes to the metaverse.
Throughout history, technology made jumps that created entirely new industries and economies. And another jump happened recently. It’s called the metaverse and it’ll change how everything works.
Even since Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement every news website and channel started to paint out this dystopian future where all of us are dammed to be mindless robots in a cog. A ready player one meets the Matrix where Mark controls everything. It’s the easy narrative to go with and the one that gets the most clicks.
But, this isn’t about the big companies trying to build the matrix. This is about you, understanding what’s happening and how you can make gains and profits from it. And the best way to understand this is to look at something of a smaller scale, the multiverse.
Have you watched the new Ariana Grande concert which was built inside the game Fortnite? No one would have thought that in 2021, Ariana Grande will tour in Fortnite. It manages to create a unique experience with a completely new level of interaction.
Something similar to this happened with Travis Scott last year. This type of experience does really well. It is connecting something from the real world with something from the virtual world. Something very interesting is happening right now across industries at the same time.
BMW announced their new car in Rocket League. You have streaming companies like Netflix making video games. You have video game-making companies like Riot making Netflix shows. The result is a disruption of how we interact with both worlds. And what’s really possible.
So, what exactly is the metaverse?
Saying what the metaverse is now, is like saying what the internet was in the 90s. There was no concept of social media content creators, sharing platforms, trading platforms, platforms that make other platforms and the list goes on.
Technically, the metaverse is whatever we build on it it sits at the crossroad of web 3.0, blockchain, and virtual reality / augmented reality. It’s the combination of these three elements that make it possible. We need to take a look at the three parts individually.
Web 3.0
Web 3.0 is the next version of the internet. Web 1.0 looked like the website mentioned at the beginning of the article. It’s just a page with a bunch of text and some hyperlinks to more pages with more text. There is no interaction. No user-generated content. Only some text on a screen.
Web 2.0 is what we currently have now. It is largely community-based. Most of it is user-generated content. It is highly interactive and you can do a bunch of stuff on it. One really important thing to mention here, there is only one thing you can only buy and own on the internet, a single thing. It is a domain name. Just like we own www.slviki.org nobody in the world can make another website with the same domain name. Everything else is owned by cooperations. Take a youtube video for example. A youtube video creator made that video and he owns it. But if youtube wants to they can remove that video from their platform.
This leads us to web 3.0. The most important thing you can do on web 3.0 is own parts of the internet. Everything that you make buys or sell on the internet is yours and you have the full rights. This happens because of blockchain and more specifically because of NFTs.
NFT
They are the foundation blocks of value in the metaverse. You probably have an idea of what they are but most disregard them as useless pixels on a screen for which some idiots are paying millions of dollars. But, what is stopping you from right-click save of an NFT to your desktop?. How is that valuable?
For you to better understand how NFTs work, let’s talk about money or the story of money or how money came to be. What makes you think money, piece of paper has commercial value. Who told you that? Why would someone trade goods for your piece of paper?
Well, it’s because over the years we agreed that a dollar is worth a dollar and we trust that it always does. It’s a social construct. It’s not even real. But it makes it easy to exchange stuff so we all agree to use it.
So, the value of an NFT is how much those who embrace it decide that it’s worth and it provides ownership because it can be tracked in the blockchain. It cannot be copied. What you are failing to see is that NFTs can become in the future. The same websites transform over time.
Compare the first webpage with google maps. They are both website pages accessed from a specific link. Yet the difference between them is mindblowing. There is this great tweet that says something like “ People say NFT’s are a scam, but they post their original creations on Instagram to exchange for a digital heart.
So you have this way of truly owning something and using it in the context of web 3.0.
Virtual Reality
Now, what would be a great way to interact with this virtual reality. Virtual reality seems to be the only thing people talk about even though it’s just a part of the metaverse. Until holograms become a thing, this is the coolest thing we have right now. It’s the natural technological progression.
So when someone says Facebook is building a metaverse, it’s fundamentally wrong because they don’t own the internet or the blockchain or virtual reality. It’s like saying apple built telecommunications when they launch the iPhone. It doesn’t really matter what they or google or any other company are doing. Once blockchain becomes mainstream, the internet is owned by individuals.
Individual Ownership
This is what most people can’t wrap their heads around. Imagine you are an artist. You make one song and sell it for one dollar as an NFT. in your smart contract you add that every time your song gets sold you make 80% with 20% going to the seller. Let’s say I bought your song for $1 and I sell it to someone else for $1. In this case, you, the artist make $1 from the initial sale and 0.80 cents from the second sale. I also make 0.20 cents.
This can go on and on. Every time your song is sold you get 80% of it automatically in your digital wallet. No Spotify involved, no apple music involved. No label involved. Not only do you make a whole lot more money, but your community also makes money from your work. This is how individual ownership is happening. Everything in the metaverse works with this formula. that’s what the metaverse really is.
How can we profit from it?
This is the rise of individual ownership. So how can we make a profit from it? You need to become a native of this new land. In order for you to see new opportunities, you need to understand how they are created. And you do that by getting educated. If you have no idea how this new thing works and you quickly dismiss it as a dystopian nightmare, you’ll be left behind when reality both natural and virtual hits you. The good news is we are in the super early days.
People are just starting to get educated in this space. There is a lot of room for growth and a whole new pie to eat from.
You may also like to read: How to make money from debt? 5 ways to make money from Debt
Leave a Reply