Digital land and the metaverse

[brellis1vt]

I've been reading about digital land and the metaverse lately. Does anyone currently invest in either of these assets/companies?  What is your long term view of it?  Trying to be open minded after I missed the crypto movement for several years.  https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/business/metaverse-real-estate.amp.html

[swashbucklinstache]

I have no place in my portfolio for speculative moonshots. I will be exposed to this through publicly-owned companies in proportion to their market cap and exposure, which might well mean not at all.

That said, from a purely speculative place I think this could be good or it could be the 1960s or 2000s 3D TV. It feels like the latter to me.

[maizefolk]

I've been reading about digital land and the metaverse lately. Does anyone currently invest in either of these assets/companies?  What is your long term view of it?  Trying to be open minded after I missed the crypto movement for several years.  https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/business/metaverse-real-estate.amp.html

I'm long term bullish on virtual reality but I don't think "digital land" is going to be worth much of anything. The best analogy is probably the big rush to buy URLs in the early web days. Same principle that they weren't making any more of them and the best ones would go fast.

But it turns out the great thing about the internet is it routes around less interesting content on more direct urls and I expect the same thing will be true for VR/metareality. Sure someone paid $7M for beer.com, but that's not slowing down anyone else trying to sell beer and I have no idea what that url is hosting (I just pulled it from the wiki list of most expensive domain name transactions). And a domain like xkcd.com (or amazon.com for that matter) didn't have any value until someone set up something interesting there.

My guess is whatever system wins the race to be the standard of metareality will similarly bring together the things people find most interesting in the places they are most easily accessible and competing systems that lock up a bunch of "prime land" with investors who don't put anything interesting there will lose out because users will find the systems less interesting and engaging.

[swashbucklinstache]

I've been reading about digital land and the metaverse lately. Does anyone currently invest in either of these assets/companies?  What is your long term view of it?  Trying to be open minded after I missed the crypto movement for several years.  https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/business/metaverse-real-estate.amp.html

I'm long term bullish on virtual reality but I don't think "digital land" is going to be worth much of anything. The best analogy is probably the big rush to buy URLs in the early web days. Same principle that they weren't making any more of them and the best ones would go fast.

But it turns out the great thing about the internet is it routes around less interesting content on more direct urls and I expect the same thing will be true for VR/metareality. Sure someone paid $7M for beer.com, but that's not slowing down anyone else trying to sell beer and I have no idea what that url is hosting (I just pulled it from the wiki list of most expensive domain name transactions). And a domain like xkcd.com (or amazon.com for that matter) didn't have any value until someone set up something interesting there.

My guess is whatever system wins the race to be the standard of metareality will similarly bring together the things people find most interesting in the places they are most easily accessible and competing systems that lock up a bunch of "prime land" with investors who don't put anything interesting there will lose out because users will find the systems less interesting and engaging.

And we eventually figured out laws for squatting on should-be-protected URLs too, so it's not likely you can do anything too cheeky a.k.a. extract money without adding your own value in some way.

[YttriumNitrate]

Hasn't this been going on in MMORPG games for a decade or two? Sure, it's got the crypto / NFT / meta trendy buzzwords, but how is it different than the previous programs?

[DaTrill]

PM me if you're interested in some swamp land in Florida or my house in Minecraft.   

[brellis1vt]

Hasn't this been going on in MMORPG games for a decade or two? Sure, it's got the crypto / NFT / meta trendy buzzwords, but how is it different than the previous programs?

That is sort of what I am trying to figure out as well.   I see the value in the metaverse (watching live football games with your friends that live 5 hours away, etc.). But I can't figure out the value of digital land.  Why would Nike buy digital land to build their metaverse store on there own.

@DaTrill I'll take a pass on them.  But don't knock swamp land in Florida.  I'll trade the nice weather in Florida any day of the week over the winters in the NE.

[Psychstache]

Did anyone make money on Second Life land? Seems like the closest if imperfect comparison.

[maizefolk]

Did anyone make money on Second Life land? Seems like the closest if imperfect comparison.

Linden Labs (the developer) makes a significant amount of money from selling land to its users.

There are various stories online of "real estate agents" who made substantial sums in second life but it sounds like they're actually much more developers: designing and building nice houses people are willing to pay substantially more for than bare land.

[mattpew]

What is your long term view of it?

Bullish on VR - it has the potential to massively disrupt commercial real estate, airlines, and residential housing prices on it's implications to the white-collar workforce alone.  I've yet to see someone who wasn't amazed after trying these productivity tools for the first time.

But being bullish on VR doesn't mean bullish on "virtual real estate", whatever that means.  The article starts off mentioning "a virtual real estate company that recently sold a 50 percent stake in itself for about $1.7 million", that's peanuts in this economy of cheap-money and frenzied bubble-chasers.  There is no such "virtual real estate market" outside of whatever the latest fad-chasing con artist is trying to sell to you.

Trying to be open minded after I missed the crypto movement for several years. 

You didn't "miss" anything - no one's "missed" anything yet.  I'll consider the "crypto movement" to be "missed" when I see people actually using the technology for it's stated use cases at a scale that even remotely justifies current valuations, as opposed to speculative investment.

[ChpBstrd]

There's something weird about a world where we expect people will spend a larger and larger percentage of their income on digital entertainment content, and also:

professionals are living with their parents into their 30s and never having kids, stock valuations are so high experts are warning of a retirement catastrophe, people are regularly dying due to a lack of insurance, young people are refusing to go to college because the debt will destroy their lives, demographics in industrialized democracies are rapidly turning gray, the national debt just reached $230,000 per taxpayer, and inflation is galloping along in the 5-7% range.

Might I humbly suggest that digital entertainment content will be much less in demand during the next recession, when rent, groceries, etc. take precedence.

[HeadedWest2029]

Animal Spirits just did a pod on a metaverse index fund https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2021/11/talk-your-book-the-dao-of-defi-index-funds/
I don't have any interest in buying it for a number of reasons, but just from an educational perspective on what's coming down the pipeline for investing in a diversified way.
The Index Coop has a number of crypto related indexes, but the metaverse one is here https://www.indexcoop.com/mvi.html
Like most things DeFi, it's still a pain in the ass to buy, lots of intermediary orgs that take a slice in fees even though the Index Coop is a DAO.  It still feels like we're a ways away from this becoming a one-click buy with more transparent fees, lower spreads, etc.  I don't get the appeal, but it's cool, I'll keep learning.

[index]

I have a meta bridge in Brooklyn for sale!

[ChpBstrd]

I have a meta bridge in Brooklyn for sale!

What if being prosperous in the 21st century involved nothing more than staying away from social media investment memes / scams?

[DaTrill]

There's something weird about a world where we expect people will spend a larger and larger percentage of their income on digital entertainment content, and also:

professionals are living with their parents into their 30s and never having kids, stock valuations are so high experts are warning of a retirement catastrophe, people are regularly dying due to a lack of insurance, young people are refusing to go to college because the debt will destroy their lives, demographics in industrialized democracies are rapidly turning gray, the national debt just reached $230,000 per taxpayer, and inflation is galloping along in the 5-7% range.

Might I humbly suggest that digital entertainment content will be much less in demand during the next recession, when rent, groceries, etc. take precedence.

Are you trying to tell me that if I get completely wasted and stay up until 4 am, I will have a hangover the next day?  Dude, this time it's different.  "Party like it's 1999"

[DaTrill]

I have a meta bridge in Brooklyn for sale!

Tell me more.  Do you accept MMMcoins?