Hey, guys! Welcome back to another Saturday morning Meta Money
here with BitBoy on the BitBoy channel.
Got an exciting one today.
NFTs versus the metaverse head on head.
I want to know, in 10 years,
what do you think is going to be the bigger ecosystem?
It's hard.
It's hard to pick one side because, you know.
You could really make the argument that NFTs could be much larger than metaverse,
but it's really hard to make the argument
that metaverse is going to be much larger than NFTs because
everything within the metaverse is going to be made up of NFTs.
They're kind of hand in hand.
- Yeah. - That's what you said to me earlier.
But is-- okay.
So, is a metaverse, so, like, considered Web3?
Are those synonymous?
Can we make that, like, a thing? Or
is the metaverse a virtual world that you have to go into?
Where do we draw the line there?
Well, I do think that's a great point
because we're already seeing, you know, current Web2 type style metaverses popping up, right?
When you've got Facebook, or Meta, talking about theirs,
there's obviously going to be a closed ecosystem.
I can't remember who else it was.
There was another--
another big company came out and said they were going to do a closed ecosystem metaverse.
And that doesn't really align with the ideals of Web3, right?
Because Web3 is decentralized.
- It focuses heav-- yeah. - Blockchain--
Heavily on peer-to-peer.
And when you're putting a third party in that is kind of like taking money from all sides,
then that kind of defeats the purpose of Web3.
So, you know, when you look at this,
I think, ultimately, those kinds of Web2 style metaverses will fail
because what really is different between, you know, just connecting--
if you just connected Call of Duty and Fortnite.
Like, that would basically be the same thing.
If you were to connect those,
you go back and forth between them,
but you couldn't go anywhere outside of it,
and you still had to use all the things that you purchased
within those videogame ecosystems, and you couldn't take them out.
That really defeats the whole point of metaverse.
It's really-- really, Web2 metaverse is just a really big video game.
Right.
Yeah. I mean, Web3, though, cannot even exist without NFTs,
so, like, I don't-- I don't think so.
- I mean-- - Well, I mean, like what Ben said,
you know, you got Meta.
Like, they're creating a metaverse that will have probably zero NFT interaction
or integration whatsoever, right?
Zero?
I mean, your identity eventually could be on the blockchain as some sort of kind of NFT.
But with Meta.
I don't see Meta incorporating it into theirs. I just don't.
Well, we already know they're incorporating NFTs to Instagram,
where you can use them kind of as your profile picture and stuff like that,
so there's some--
I think they understand the loose association they need to have with NFTs.
It's really when you get into the minutiae,
when you get into how the operating systems actually work,
that's where they're going to reject the NFTs
because they don't want to have a free flowing ecosystem
for people to be able to trade things that they can't control.
Do you think it has to be along the lines of, like, what you're built for?
We've talked about this one.
Other metaverses where-- or, you know, the project,
it was built specifically for blockchain,
or you're seeing some of these, like, traditional "games" shift to it,
and it's, like, not successful at all.
So, if you've got a metaverse that was not built with blockchain or Web3 in mind with NFT integration,
you'd have to pretty much scrap the whole platform and rebuild it with that in mind, right?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, think about if you had, like, some kind of business
that you're wanting to build before the internet came out,
and then the internet came out and kind of, like, completely wiped away your business model.
- Yeah. - Hey, you have no choice!
It's either scrap it and start over.
But the good thing is, when it comes to business, like,
and I'm telling you, I see this more and more every single day
with all these conversations we're having with companies
that are wanting to basically move their models onto blockchain,
the most important thing is the idea.
Right? When it comes to starting a business, the most important thing is the idea.
So if you have something you're putting together and now it's not going to be compatible with Web3,
well, you still had the initial idea of what that business was going to be.
You just have to find a way to kind of morph that into something that fits into the Web3 world.
You know, Web3 is coming.
It's coming fast.
It's coming hard.
It's coming heavy.
We're going to see a lot of these legacy Web2--
a lot of these legacy Web2, you know, social media companies
are going to really have to scrap to try to stay relevant.
And look, we're not talking about next year.
- Like, this is what people have to understand. - Yeah.
We're not talking about next year.
- And that's why I said, like, 10 years from now because we think-- - Yes. Absolutely.
- I mean, for any interoperable metave-- - 10 years is far though.
Like, it's hard to kind of even predict what's going to happen in 10 years.
In the world, obviously, it's hard to predict 10 years,
but I think that, you know, we have enough insight into how things move within crypto.
Like, if you look at Bitcoin 10 years ago versus where we are now--
Would you have ever predicted this though?
Pricewise? I don't know.
But has the technology changed? No.
- Okay. Here's the thing about it. - With besides Lightning.
- So I bought Bitcoin 10 years ago. - Alright.
We're coming up on my 10-year anniversary in December
- of buying Bitcoin for the first time, - Whew!
which is really insane.
I look back at that time, and I had no idea what was coming for Bitcoin.
But that's because I was an idiot.
- That's because I had no idea what I was buying. - Right.
- Like, I was just throwing money into something. - Yeah.
- If you look back at-- - There was a utility for you.
- It wasn't even a-- - Exactly.
- It wasn't an investment. There was utility. - It's currency.
But that's what these companies are doing now in a way.
A lot of them are raising money for the Web3 portion of their company,
but they don't even really know what that is yet.
They're just kind of like throwing money.
And there's not even a lot of developers that are even building that out.
So it's just--
it's interesting.
And not every company has to go Web3 either.
I don't know if I necessarily--
Web2 is going to be dead at some point, so, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, I believe Web2 will be--
look, where's Web1?
- It doesn't really exist. - Was there even a Web1?
- Yeah. Web1 is the initial stage of the internet. - The AOL depths, right?
It's basically--
- If you think of Web-- - I guess what I'm saying is
some of these companies are going to fail, but it's not necessarily--
- Like, maybe they just can't transition to Web3. - Yeah, absolutely!
But they'll have to find a way in some way.
- Even if you-- - No, not necessarily. They may go bust.
- It may happen, you know? - Well, that's the thing. They're going to go bust.
Because if you have, you know, a way to prove transactions,
or to integrate smart contracts,
so you don't have an AR department or an AP department, you know,
everything is all smart contract-based,
like, you'll-- it's you'll--
- You won't survive. - Yeah.
And they will have to do it out of necessity in order to keep the lights on in the building.
Yeah. So let me give you a great example of this.
I want to go back to where I was going first, though,
with what I talked about buying Bitcoin 10 years ago.
The people that were in the know,
the people that were in Bitcoin,
not because they were just buying shrooms off Silk Road,
or they were buying a software,
but the people that were really in Bitcoin on the Bitcoin Talk forum at that time,
they did see all this coming.
- The cyperphunks? - Yes.
- Well, no, no. I mean, that's even earlier. - That's true.
I'm talking about people in 2012
that were buying Bitcoin because they had an idea of what it was going to become.
Those people knew. So those people could envision.
So people that are really plugged into Web3, like, they can understand.
Let me give you a great example of what we're talking about here
when it comes to adapt or die.
If you go back 12, 13, 14 years ago,
you did not need a mobile site.
- You didn't need a mobile site. - Right.
A lot of companies, when mobile sites started coming out,
they said, "We're not going to do that. We're just going to keep our regular format."
If you pulled up--
if you pulled up a website on your phone that had no mobile format,
would you use it?
No, absolutely not!
They had to adapt.
Now, eventually, the entire ecosystem of Web2,
which is a lot of--
mobile integration is synonymous with Web2 as well.
What happened is, eventually,
companies rose up that were able to create websites
that spanned across mobile and regular,
they're called responsive websites, what almost every website is today,
you go to it,
you don't have to go to m., you know, bitboycrypto.com,
which would be the old mobile site.
You just go to bitboycrypto.com.
It auto formats it.
Because as this develops,
all these problems that we're looking at, like,
"How is this going to work?"
"How does this integrate?"
well, companies come out, and they solve all those.
So, right now, when we're fast forwarding and we're looking 10 years in the future,
we're basing it off of our understanding of technology today,
blockchain today, the internet today.
It's not going to make sense in 10 years because you're going to have companies
that are going to solve all of these problems to make the integration better and easier.
And I just don't, you know.
It's evolution of technology, right?
We'll be talking about Web4 in 10 years from now.
- Or probably shorter than that. - You know? - Yeah.
I don't know what Web4 is. I don't know. Maybe you can time travel.
I've been--
honestly, and I know you say that as a joke, literally for as long as I can remember,
time travel is the one thing that I would love to be able to do
that probably will never happen.
- Like, I used to, like, look these stuff up-- - Wouldn't everybody?
Well, no, some people are afraid of it because of the whole molecular discombobulation.
- You get put back with, you know, an arm-- - Molecular discombobulation.
You like that? I made that up right now.
Where's the DeLorean?
I'm jumping in!
I would get one.
Well, I tell you what, I'd like to go back to the beginning of this episode.
- And just-- - Watch it again.
It was so great.
Yeah, do that. And also head over to the Meta Money channel.
Subscribe there. We talk a lot about the metaverse and Web3.
We're going to see where that's going in the future.
Thank you guys for hanging out today!
We'll see you next week.