Spatial News™ #009
This week we're all about a child-safe metaverse, a Blockchain-less Web3, and computer vision.
Welcome to the 9th life of Spatial News™! "Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them." -Assata Shakur in Assata: An Autobiography Isn’t that what this XR, Web3, and metaverse stuff is all about?
Spatial Spotlight: Stray Robots
Last week, Spatial8’s “Spatial Spotlight” was on one of our ecosystem’s newest members Stray Robots, a company on a mission to structure the world’s visual data and teach robots and computers to see. Learn more about them and how they dramatically lower the barrier for deploying computer vision solutions here.
Responses to Comments and Criticisms of Web3
Thanks to Timo Springer’s latest Web3 Insider newsletter (one I follow) for providing links to responses to Moxie Marlinspike’s article that I shared in last week’s newsletter.
Find Twitter and Reddit responses by
Vitalik Buterin, Co-Founder of Ethereum, here,
“As for my theory about ‘why this hasn't happened yet’, I would say a lot of it comes down to limited technical resources and funding. It's easier to build things the lazy centralized way, and it takes serious effort to ‘do it right’.
Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder & CEO at Coinbase, here,
“I do agree that all networks tend toward centralization over time. Great book on this. I don't think crypto is anywhere near this end stage though. We are still seeing a lot of new technology and players enter the space. It's not ‘already centralized’ as much as it is ‘still using some web2 components’.”
Chris Dixon, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, here,
“The lower take rates will make web3 services especially appealing to creators who are unable to build sustainable businesses on web2 platforms. web2's take rate is web3's opportunity”
Aditya Agarwal, Ex-Dropbox CTO and Facebook Engineering, here, and
“The world is too complex to try to predict in any form. Instead, I tend to think about whether the underlying ideas are useful and can be used. In that sense, blockchains, NFTs, DAOs, Defi etc. are super-interesting constructs that will be used to create interesting things”
Explore at your leisure.
Image credit: Nexo.io
And since this debate is far from over.
Web3 doesn’t need Blockchain (Part 1)
I asked my friend Tiago Sampaio, Co-Founder of Fibo (Spatial8 ecosystem member) and R&D Director of AnalysisMode, his take on all of the Web3/Blockchain hubbub, and I’d like to share the transcription exclusively with you, Spatialists.
(Little known fact, back in the day, circa mid-2019, Tiago and I were planning on starting a company with a platform built on Ethereum Blockchain where micro-investors could buy/sell equity tokens of hot startups. A portion of the trading fees would act as passive income for startups, which they could then invest in themselves helping to grow their market cap. I even came up with a really cool name for the company, if I don’t say so myself. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be…)
Tiago says,
“Everyone says that Blockchain is the technology that will make Web3 happen or that Blockchain equals Web3 - so much fuss.
Blockchain is still trying to find the perfect problem to solve, and Web3 is about creating value from data [and] creating value from digital products, and you don’t need Blockchain for that.
The biggest argument [supporters have]: “Hey, Blockchain, Web3, autonomous organizations, everything should be decentralized… but the thing is that Web1 was [already] decentralized. [It] was perfect in that sense. Then Web2 became centralized because you had so many devices to jump in so you had to centralize data and other information so you could access them from multiple devices and have that synchronized. Now, Web3 is about being able to be move the data from these centralized silos back to a decentralized manner in which people can retain ownership of that [data] and also provide value.
If you just take the concepts that were already used in Web1, you could [for instance] have a regulated marketplace for digital goods or even the idea that we had about “Fibo Cloud”, this whole new Internet [an idea that I still believe could be in our future -Joh]. You don’t need a Blockchain transaction or even to pay to make a transaction or a registry on some public Blockchain data. [It can work] by having a trusted amount of peers just like the way BitTorrent works [, and the technology] has been around for so many years.”
To be continued in Spatial News™ #010…
A Child-safe Metaverse?
Galit Ariel, a “Technofuturist” and “Techivist”, makes an important point related to regulating the metaverse in a recent LinkedIn post:
“I don't want the collateral damage of the Metaverse Gold Rush to be humans. Definitely not kids…
Should we expose kids to this dimension before we fully understand it? Not in a commercial manner, no.
She uses the newly launched “Kartoon Channel! Kidaverse” as an example of this kind of too early exposure.
A commenter replied,
“To be honest, I think it is a pipe dream to have kids-safe social media (as the metaverse will be some version of that) that has commercial goals…”
What say you, dear reader, is child safety online anathema to “harsh commercial reality”?
Nevermind…
This just in: Meta’s virtual world will be built on the expressions of tiny humans.
Oops, I read that wrong.
“Meta hopes to use tiny human expressions to create virtual world of personalised ads…”
Still…
It all reminds me of an excerpt from my nonexistent book entitled This Book Does Not Exist:
“My generation was raised by cartoon leaders and sitcom parents that encouraged me from out of a box. This generation is raised by nostalgia-infused ad-vatars that encourage them from within the box. You gotta respect the generational long game.”
Thank you for reading Spatial News™, (which one historian in the future will hopefully dub) the “catnip of Web3”! And remember, you are spatial!
P.S. Don’t forget to take our Future Technologies Usage Survey 2021 for a chance to get some random NFTs!