Google disables RCS in India. Why? Because marketers were abusing the feature

What is a metaverse?

• There are two competing visions for how to bring this about
• One is decentralized, generous with property rights and new frontiers, interoperable, open, and owned by the communities that build and maintain it
• The other is centralized, closed, subject to the whims of corporations, and often extracts painful economic rents from its creators, contributors, and inhabitants

Decentralization

• This is the overarching principle of a proper metaverse, and many of the traits that follow depend on or result from this main concept.
• Centralized platforms tend to start friendly and cooperative to attract users and developers, but once growth slows they become competitive, extractive, and zero-sum
• The strongest way to protect against abuses and secure a metaverse is to ensure that control is decentralized

Property rights

• When you buy something, you own it
• Just as courts of law uphold these rights in the physical world, so should code enforce it online.
• Metaverses turn digital serfs into homesteaders
• True digital property rights weren’t possible before the advent of cryptography, blockchain technology, and related innovations such as NFTs

Self-sovereign identity

• You can’t own anything if you don’t own yourself
• Authentication is about identity: proving who a person is, what they have access to, and what information they share
• The cryptography at the core of web3 enables people to authenticate without relying on intermediaries, so people can control their identity directly or with the help of services they choose

Composability

• The ability to mix and match software components like lego bricks
• Every software component only needs to be written once and can thereafter simply be reused
• In their strongest form, composability and interoperability are possible permissionessly across wide ranges of the software stack
• Anyone can adapt, recycle, change, or import existing code

Openness/open source

• True composability is impossible without open source, which is the practice of making code freely available and able to be redistributed and modified at will.
• Openness leads to more secure software, makes the economic terms more knowable to all parties, and eliminates information asymmetries.

Community ownership

• All stakeholders should have a say, proportionally to their involvement, in the governance of the system
• DAOs allow for communities that are governed, built, and driven forward by their users, rather than by a single entity
• The philosophical implications of this are crucial to the success of the metaverse

Social immersion

• A metaverse does not have to exist in VR/AR. All that’s necessary for a metaverse to exist is social immersion in the broad sense.
• Metaverse has nothing to do with “view” modalities – the tools you use to see the metaverse. The development of an ideal multi-dimensional virtual world will come about gradually.