New World Notes

Bitcoin as the Future of Money for the World's Poor - Interesting Idea With Some Obvious Flaws

Bitcoin is the Sewer Rat of Currencies

Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing fame has a really interesting interview with computer scientist and Bitcoin advocate Andreas Antonopoulos, who makes a use case for the virtual currency I haven't quite seen before: As a means of bringing the billions of impoverished people without access to the mainstream financial system into the global economy. Sample:

If you look at the statistics, financial inclusion is getting worse. That doesn’t make any sense unless you consider that, in the meantime, the traditional currencies and digital finance systems have been getting more and more prone to surveillance and tied to identity where everything is tracked. They’re closing in on themselves in order to maintain this ironclad control over who sends money to who, all in the name of terrorist prevention and anti-money laundering, which is bullshit because HSBC could money-launder billions...

You cannot create global finance and economic inclusion on the back of a carefully controlled show-us-your-papers identity-based system where everything is tracked. What you create is a global surveillance dystopia. Our entire financial system is heading into this thing where everything is surveilled. Bitcoin is heading in exact opposite direction. No identity by default, from weak pseudonymity to a stronger and stronger anonymity as time goes by. As a result, it doesn’t do borders. It doesn’t care about borders. It doesn’t do Know Your Customer. It doesn’t do Anti-Money Laundering. It doesn’t do those things because those things are bourgeois concepts of the privileged financial elite. Those bourgeois concepts have a four-billion-people-in-poverty price tag.

Bitcoin, of course, is also a bourgeois concept par excellence, a libertarian conceit largely supported by the wealthy (and mostly white) tech elite. That somewhat unfair snark aside, Antonopoulos is very right that the unbanked majority of the world need a scalable financial solution.

Does that mean Bitcoin is the answer? Three facts spring to mind which make me think otherwise:

Full-Scale Recreation of Casablanca Built in Second Life

If you're a movie geek, you'll want to click here to visit a full-scale recreation of Casablanca from the classic film of the same name. Built by Sommer Shepherd and TracyLynne Carpenter, I gave it a quick visit last night and was seriously impressed by the level of detail and fidelity to the film's locations. I couldn't get into Rick's Place, which seems to be locked up at the moment. (Under curfew, like in the movie?) And as the above suggests, there's even the runway with a departing plane where you can reenact the most famous scene in cinema:

Mark Zuckerberg Posts Inadvertantly Dystopian Vision of Virtual Reality on Facebook

Facebook founder posted this photo on his own Facebook page, announcing various Oculus Rift-related announcements:

I ask you, readers of this 10 year+ virtual reality blog, which of you find this an appealing image? A lot of my technorati friends are on the page Liking this photo like crazy, but interestingly, the most Liked comments are these:

Open Forum: Say Anything About VR & Virtual Worlds

The microphone is yours: News, opinions, events, self-promotion. I always try to highlight as many noteworthy comments as possible in future posts!

Top Five New World Notes Posts from Last Week!

• High Fidelity Achieves Fully-Articulated, Real-Time, Motion-Captured Avatar Finger Movement, Leads to the Inevitable
• Firestorm Users Donate Only $8417 in Linden Dollars to Volunteer Team of Second Life's Most-Used Viewer
• System Shock 3 in Development After 15+ Year Delay & 3 "Spiritual Successors", Warren Spector Confirms
• VR Companies Directly Inspired by VR Depictions in Science Fiction Novels -- But Ignore Negative Aspects in Originals
• Project Sansar Faces Heavy Competition from Major 3D Platforms & Needs "Something Special" to Survive

High Fidelity Achieves Fully-Articulated, Real-Time, Motion-Captured Avatar Finger Movement, Leads to the Inevitable

Ladies and gentlemen, High Fidelity has achieved the the ultimate in customized avatar expression:

One small step for Mankind? Today @highfidelityinc we saw 1st networked avatar with fingers https://t.co/pmf7jZTxdW pic.twitter.com/VDjNCXpjnM

— Stanford VR (@StanfordVR) February 19, 2016

"This was a demonstration of using Leap Motion's new 'Orion' update with High Fidelity," company founder Philip Rosedale tells me. So now Alpha users with Leap's motion capture camera and a High Fidelity script can translate their real world finger movements to the fingers of their avatar.

Juvenile bird-flashing aside, this is an extremely impressive, well, leap for Leap:

Watch The Next Generation of SL Avatars Come Alive

Do you want an avatar with Uncanny Valley-crossing levels of realism and expression? Of course you do, of course you do. Let SL avatar master Strawberry Singh show you how it's done through the latest user-made avatar enhancements. In fact, you can even watch her doing so in this video above.

Firestorm Users Donate Only $8417 in Linden Dollars to Volunteer Team of Second Life's Most-Used Viewer

Firestorm, the third party viewer that's by far the most popular software for using Second Life -- more popular, in fact, than the official viewer put out by Linden Lab itself-- is created and maintained by a large team of dedicated volunteers. The team recently asked the Firestorm user community to donate Linden Dollars they could convert into cash to help pay some important maintenance bills, and here's what they got:

At the time of writing this [January 31st] 12:46PM SLT, the balance is L$2,087,455. Our target goal—which I didn’t think we had much hope of hitting—was L$1.6 million. This would give us enough for our Kakadu license, some money for marketing and some money for an accountant, a lawyer and the taxes which we’ll certainly have to pay because of this fund drive. We are over 2 million Linden Dollars right now, and actually it is too much! Really it is!

Team lead Jessica Lyon says she's happy, and I'm happy she's happy, but I'm not: L$2,087,455 is roughly just $8417 in US dollars -- a paltry amount to maintain software used by roughly 400,000 people. About 65-75% of the 600,000 active SLers use Firestorm, by my estimate based on past Linden Lab stats. So $8417 comes down to pennies per each user.

This is disappointing (if unsurprising), especially when Ms. Lyon talks about what her team has to contend with in her very same Thank You note:

The unfortunate reality in what we do is that most of the time we only hear from the disgruntled, upset, screaming, frustrated, angry users while only occasionally hearing from the folks who genuinely appreciate what we do and offer us a thank you.

So not only are they mostly not getting thanked or financially supported for their volunteer efforts, they're also getting abused.

Understand, I'm not criticizing the Firestorm community as a whole:

Worlds Adrift: Single-Sharded, Fully-Simulated MMO

Worlds Adrift is an upcoming MMO which is just about the most impressive virtual world project I've read about in some time -- primarily because it is a virtual world in the sense of being a persistent place with an environment that responds like an environment actually would. Built in Unity by a small indie team, it's using Improbable technology, which we wondered last year might transform virtual worlds. And to judge by this blog post about Worlds Adrift on the Improbable site, it looks like it has:

Hackers Hold Hospital Data for Virtual Currency Ransom

Los Angeles hospital paid hackers $17,000 ransom in Bitcoins https://t.co/4mZixFqzWG pic.twitter.com/aVHlepf3uj

— VentureBeat (@VentureBeat) February 18, 2016

It's @GreatDismal's universe, we just live in it. https://t.co/ijdtYG6qlq

— Wagner James Au (@slhamlet) February 18, 2016

@Greatdismal, of course, is William Gibson. Who nicely just retweeted this. In case any Bitcoin advocate cares, incidents like this are exactly why Bitcoin will never go mainstream, but I doubt they're listening to me. But I'm just a guy writing about the metaverse industry occasionally noticing current events are indistinguishable from science fiction written just twenty-thirty years ago, so why should they listen?