’Cause Bandra west is everywhere: The fallacy of scarcity in the Metaverse
THE DESIRABILITY ARGUMENT: Bandra west, IRL (in real life) is home to Bollywood’s mega stars. In an otherwise over crowded metropolis that is Mumbai, this suburb maintains it’s quaintness with colonial era cottages, greenery and a mix of accessible nightlife venues against a backdrop of skyscrapers, making it a highly desirable location. The same holds for other mega cities; Clarke Quay in Singapore… Sh.Zayed Road, Dubai… Sunset Strip…
However, unlike real life, where natural land formations, weather and economic activity dictate the price of property and where slums jostle for space with high-rises as the header picture exemplifies…in the Metaverse* many of these constraints do not hold water (a little foreshadowing there).
Myth: LAND SCARCITY IN THE METAVERSE: Scarcity in the Metaverse, is a myth. A myth propagated by unscrupulous crypto brokers — whose sole motivation is to speculate on profits of funny-money, a.k.a. cryptocurrency after a deal has been transacted. Thus their desire to turn the Metaverse into a ‘Cryptoverse’. A world where every interaction is a Transaction.
They forget, for scarcity to work in virtual real-estate, one needs to abolish that ancient practice of…Teleporting
No one walks in the Metaverse. The mode of commuting is usually a laser point and click mechanic, to cover any amount of distance in a second. No downtown traffic to negotiate, no crowded footpaths to traverse.
The Cryptoverses selling digital land parcels, and there a few of them reviewed here, would have you believe that the same conditions that dictate prices IRL, apply to the Metaverse. Again — teleporting disproves it. Spinning up another server disproves it. The premise of ‘virtual society’ as an argument does not hold true.
In real life — yes, I’d likely not want to commute to ‘Sobo’ (South Bombay) to mingle, because it would take an hour. In the Metaverse I could mingle in virtual Times Square NY, and then teleport to Clarke Quay, Singapore, in a second. That’s what the metaverse offers.
I was fortunate to visit the Atlantis Dubai’s Underwater Suite and remember saying to myself — This is the virtual world I’d love to have projected on my windows at home. Such real estate would be at a premium as one would imagine. But, in a virtual world; a Metaverse? Those land-parcels that Cryptoverses like to dice into blocks and sell at a premium on the public Blockchain, because it’s near the coast or at the ‘city center’?… you understand why that’s a fallacy now.
*Plot Twist: THE XR METAVERSE
So far we’ve been looking at the Metaverse to be a virtual world that’s either entered into typically via a VR headset for maximum immersion or, accessed through a desktop computer or tablet. However, the XR-Metaverse can drape itself as a digital overlay — pin registered — to the real world, and seen via Augmented Reality eyewear, or today, via a cellphone camera; dubbed video-seethru AR. Solutions such as Google’s Spatial API can make it happen. This was near-future hard sci-fi which I’d written about in 2010; Will Google create a Surrogate Reality World, and today we can experience it.
So what does that mean for virtual real estate in the XR Metaverse? Surely — its value will proportionately skyrocket in tandem with its real world twin. Or will it?
Who owns Bandra West in the XR Metaverse? — The Government, The Telcos, The Roads and Transport Authority?
That’s the right question to ask. Cryptoverse operators who currently sell “land” at ridiculous prices will try to justify prices by saying their Metaverse is pin-registered to the real world where real world inhabitants will be populating it (either in person or as digital avatars of themselves)
The problem is the metaverse needs to be accessed via a gateway — usually, a Telco gateway or portal.
ENTER, THE MULTIVERSE:
Who’s to stop:
- Vodafone from running a parallel XRMetaverse draped over the same real world location as Reliance Jio does.
- AT&T running their metaverse over Verizon’s pin registered to the same Times Square.
- An enterprising Entrepreneur overlaying Bangalore’s MG road and storefront signage over Bandra’s Linking Road
Indeed, there is no guarantee — just because celebs reside in real-life in one location that they would be seen in the XR metaverse at venues in that same location . They could be ‘partying’ at an underwater nightclub anywhere in the Metaverse.
CONCLUSION: The Metaverse is a world of Abundance not of Scarcity
Scarcity if at all, will be driven not by rarity of NFTs (another fallacy there) or “Land parcels” but by bandwidth demands and the spatial mandates of avatar ‘personal space’ when accessing desirable hot-spots where like minded “minds” hang-out. Even then, it depends on the Telco gate or portal entered.
“… It could be Bandra west or anywhere…Liverpool or Rome… ’cause the Metaverse is anywhere…everywhere alone…”
“𝗜 𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗮𝘀” — OTT Studios, before pivoting to a crypto flavored Web3.0 & buying into the NFT ‘rarity’, scarcity and inter-operability hype — schedule a consultation. You’ve probably heard of the failed Chevrolet NFT project
Originally published on the RealVision knowledgebase here
