The 100 years isn't the issue here, nor Rolex in particular. Replace Rolex with a contemporary brand and dcolkitt's point stands even more clearly. There is nothing in the law that makes a distinction between a Rolex watch and some other brand that people may purchase hoping it will garner prestige someday through present-day marketing efforts. It would be absurd to make that distinction.
The salient point is many things may be purchased for "speculative profit you hope to make [...] reliant on the business", but that by itself doesn't make them securities according to the law, so it's just not the right test to use.
I'd argue that the difficulty in banking is not to get the technology working.
Financial software is regular software with additional audits and checks to make sure it's safe against the flood of attacks it will receive. With the kind of money we are talking about, you can hire people with the expertise to reasonably protect you against bugs and software exploits (something most traditional financial companies have a close to 100% track record in but many crypto projects failed).
But after that you have a mountain of issues to consider that have little to nothing to do with software:
- financial logical holes like flash loans being used to extract money "democratically"
- people committing age old scams "but on the block chain"
- founders not understanding problems such as that you cannot secure one unsecured coin with another one no matter the algorithm.
- all sorts of unpleasant people using your "financial playground" to do things society frowns upon.
All of these are solvable but not by choosing a better technology stack. Look at how much traditional institutions are spending on compliance and realise that you probably won't be able to cut that by an order of magnitude.
Crypto is learning very quickly that most regulations do not exist to "keep the little man down" but because having regular people get fleeced over and over by charismatics liers/fools can have a devastating effect on any community.
For better or worse, Crypto is legitimately the easiest way to create a financial application, derivative, exchange etc... any programmer can create interesting, useful, and novel financial instruments like Squeeth, crvUSD, PoolTogether, etc in short order. Good luck recreating those in TradFi in under a decade, let along making them interact with each other in atomic transactions.
Of course, some people see this as a bad thing because it enables scammers to create all sorts of new and improved ponzi schemes. Others think it's a good thing because it speeds up financial innovation and levels the playing field between big banks and small startups.
Some might argue that crypto is only useful for building apps insofar as it avoids regulation, but you also can't convince me that Wells Fargo is the future of finance. Banks could never create a financial playground that works as well as Ethereum, even using their centralized database.
IMO, so many of the projects that have come out of the crypto space are awesome and promising, but investment in the space grew faster than projects could mature. Unfortunately that leads to users losing $100M when Joe Schmo's cross-chain bridge gets hacked, when it should have never had that much TVL.
This is a mandatory install on macOS for me (one of many).
The suite of extra software utilities required to make the base OS usable is ridiculous, but I'm glad to see open source maintainers working to keep my mouse working.
I used MusicGen yesterday to create 50 songs or so. Three of them sound pretty good [1][2][3]. MusicGen is definitely the best of four models of the presentation. I used the prompts differently than the article and i think i got better results.
Suppose there is way to measure cardio beats or electricity spikes on the brain, and we configure the machine to generate music to increase cardio beats, or decrease them, or similarly increase electrical activity of the brain or decrease it. Then psychology might be deprecated, mood will be reduced to just a music channel.
For the tens of billions of dollars spent on metaverses, what's come out has been pathetic. Decentraland, Voxels, and Horizon look like video games from 1990. There are people running around saying this can't be done. They're wrong.
I've written a metaverse client that yields GTA V graphics quality and frame rate for a big virtual world. Talks to Open Simulator and Second Life servers. A small number of users are testing it. It's a long way from feature complete, but the graphics part is working nicely. Users need a midrange gamer PC (NVidia 1060 or better, at least 6 CPUs). This is a reasonably difficult problem, but it's not impossible.
Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic, says that the 600 million people using game virtual worlds should hold an online wake for the metaverse. He means Fortnite and Roblox users.
The metaverse is alive and well for gamers. But it's not headed for Facebook/Twitter scale.
So what went wrong? The NFT clown car, and Zuckerberg, went wrong.
The NFT guys are all Make Money Fast. Most of them never even shipped a virtual world.
That didn't stop them from collecting money from suckers. Slowly, at the rate of about one every few weeks, the SEC is bringing the hammer down on those guys.[1]
The ones who shipped something just slapped something together and called it a metaverse. If you haven't visited Decentraland, check it out. It's 1990s graphics quality. It's also empty; it runs about 260 concurrent users.
The whole Meta fiasco, and its motivations, has been covered elsewhere.
So what are the real problems?
First, the metaverse is boring. If you build a good virtual world, it's about as interesting as real life. Most forms of entertainment have an interesting event density about 10x to 100x that of real life. Metaverses don't. You have to make your own fun. Second Life has this problem. It's fun for people who
are into building, creating, and exploring. It's not fun for people who want to be passively entertained. This limits the market.
The game-derived metaverses, Fortnite and Roblox, are games with social areas on the side. Fortnite discovered that by accident. Their game has rounds of play, and you have to wait for the next cycle to start. So they have a "lobby". People hanging out in the lobby to socialize became a thing, and they built on that to allow users to have social spaces.
Second, there are technical problems. Metaverses need to look as good and play as well as AAA title games. This is quite possible, but not on a $99 WalMart laptop or a phone. "Cloud rendering", as with
Google Stadia (closed), Vortex (closed), and NVidia GeForce Now (still around but the price keeps going up) is an option, but the economics don't work out. Nobody can do free to play with cloud rendering.
Metaverses on a current gamer PC can work quite well, but most people don't have those.
Third, there's the VR nausea problem. If you put people in a VR environment where they can move freely but the visual world is not rigidly locked to the real world at all times, about 5% - 15% of the population becomes nauseated. VRchat shows that there's a market for this anyway, but it's about 22,000 concurrent users. The only real stat in this business is how many people are logged on right now, measured from outside the system. All other numbers can be "adjusted".
Fourth, there's really no role for "brands" in the metaverse. Despite all the hype, no real world brand has had any significant success in the metaverse. These are game worlds. A branch of Sotheby's or Hermes does not make sense. Also, showing fashion items in worlds with crap graphics just devalues the brand.
So, it's a niche. Right now, there are seven games on Steam with over 100,000 users logged in.
That's probably the size of the metaverse market.
Its not a 2022 board game - but I would really recommend Carcassonne with these two expansions:
- Traders and Builders [1]
- Inns and Cathedrals [2]
The base itself is little limited - but with these two expansions you have one of the best sets for a nice evening with friends. You can also add River or River II expansion - but they only 'divert' the beginning of the game - so you can omit them.
The Carcassonne is really a simple game - yet it takes real thinking and strategy to really master it.
What I like the most about Carcassonne is its 'minimalistic' approach. There are roads/cities/grasslands/monasteries ... and nothing else ... yet taking someone else' city or road is very important strategic move - or splitting the work between X players.
You do not need cards, figures, notes, calculators, excel or dice. You just play and move the cones on the scoring board.
It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to build a small calendar app (https://lowtechguys.com/grila) from which all the funds will go to my brother’s college costs so he can stop working 12h/day jobs.
Before this I tried creating paid web services but none took off. I realized I actually don’t use any indie web product after 8 years of professional coding. I’m only using web products from big companies like Google, fly.io, Amazon etc.
Desktop apps on the other hand, most that I use and love are made by single developers.
With the ascent of Apple Silicon, and the ease of SwiftUI, this has the potential of bringing a modest revenue while also being more fulfilling than a corporate job.
In case you’re curious how the code looks for something like that, here’s a small open-source app that I built in a single (long) day, which has proven to be useful enough that people want to pay for it: https://github.com/alin23/Clop
The salient point is many things may be purchased for "speculative profit you hope to make [...] reliant on the business", but that by itself doesn't make them securities according to the law, so it's just not the right test to use.