I've been rather starry-eyed for the last few months. I've been swept up in the potential of blockchain, and how it will change our way of life on the internet. I've daydreamed about how all our digital purchases in world will eventually be neatly pigeonholed for use in numerous games and social worlds. And the possibility of being able to cross over those items to worlds that never had such items previously. Heady stuff, to say the least!
The looming potential for all this hyperbole is a proposed Ethereum token ERC-1155. The standard was introduced by enjincoin.io. I won't go into the fine details of it, but it basically lets you make a digital purchase of several items under one transaction, rather than several items with several transactions. You should do some further research if you're unfamiliar with the concept.
So being the virtual world enthusiast I am, I let my mind wander to the ownership of digital land again. Wouldn't it be cool to actually own that decentralized sim, rather than the ugly physical reality of leasing it from the parent company controlling the servers? So Then I started looking into blockchain controlled VR. The prominent one in my sights is decentraland.org. I needed to get Mana tokens in order to buy the plots. Sadly, I fell thru the cracks on that, because I couldn't afford the token price.
But today, I got a big awakening. I read this article on the Bloomberg site. The price of the token was miniscule compared to the valuation of the digital plots quoted in the article! Then it hit me: humanity is porting the haves and have-nots into the internet. This Genesis City in Decentraland has already been carved up by the default world investors with default world money. These guys bought hundreds, even thousands of tokens, and have the equivalent in blockchain land holdings. I quote the article here: "Today, resellers can reliably get as much as $30,000 for a Genesis City plot." I encourage you to read the article in its entirety.
Those of us in Second Life that have whined about tier cost being high should count our blessings. While we have been at the mercy of Linden Lab and their pricing structure, they have at least allowed common folks like us to run simple businesses and a few of us to make a living. Affordably. Blockchain simply gives the ability to the wealthy to enter virtual worlds to earn hundreds of thousands of fiat currency that they would never have bothered to do before because there was no previous value for them to do so!
Have I soured on the concepts of blockchain? Not really. It still holds potential for everyone willing to invest. And the important word here is invest. But the mom and pop stores on Second Life are about to find themselves with the possibility of a Walmart for a neighbor across the digital street selling digital trinkets that the Asian coders will crank out for a few Enjin Coins. Because that's going to be the only place you can buy them at for a fair price.
The looming potential for all this hyperbole is a proposed Ethereum token ERC-1155. The standard was introduced by enjincoin.io. I won't go into the fine details of it, but it basically lets you make a digital purchase of several items under one transaction, rather than several items with several transactions. You should do some further research if you're unfamiliar with the concept.
So being the virtual world enthusiast I am, I let my mind wander to the ownership of digital land again. Wouldn't it be cool to actually own that decentralized sim, rather than the ugly physical reality of leasing it from the parent company controlling the servers? So Then I started looking into blockchain controlled VR. The prominent one in my sights is decentraland.org. I needed to get Mana tokens in order to buy the plots. Sadly, I fell thru the cracks on that, because I couldn't afford the token price.
But today, I got a big awakening. I read this article on the Bloomberg site. The price of the token was miniscule compared to the valuation of the digital plots quoted in the article! Then it hit me: humanity is porting the haves and have-nots into the internet. This Genesis City in Decentraland has already been carved up by the default world investors with default world money. These guys bought hundreds, even thousands of tokens, and have the equivalent in blockchain land holdings. I quote the article here: "Today, resellers can reliably get as much as $30,000 for a Genesis City plot." I encourage you to read the article in its entirety.
Those of us in Second Life that have whined about tier cost being high should count our blessings. While we have been at the mercy of Linden Lab and their pricing structure, they have at least allowed common folks like us to run simple businesses and a few of us to make a living. Affordably. Blockchain simply gives the ability to the wealthy to enter virtual worlds to earn hundreds of thousands of fiat currency that they would never have bothered to do before because there was no previous value for them to do so!
Have I soured on the concepts of blockchain? Not really. It still holds potential for everyone willing to invest. And the important word here is invest. But the mom and pop stores on Second Life are about to find themselves with the possibility of a Walmart for a neighbor across the digital street selling digital trinkets that the Asian coders will crank out for a few Enjin Coins. Because that's going to be the only place you can buy them at for a fair price.
