What is evolution?

If you've seen Escher's paintings expressing strange circles, you can see why the direction of evolution is a topic that needs to be explored.

Because we cannot prove whether there is a distorted state of the Mobius ring in the universe we live in - each small step forward (updated iteration of technology) does not mean that the whole group is evolving, it may just be towards the starting point ( means degenerate) is just another non-intuitive way of doing it.

The emergence of the Metaverse brought a glimmer of hope to the answer to this question.

Of course, the author is not so optimistic that the Metaverse must represent the direction of evolution, but its development along the way does show us an ideal definition of evolution—dimensional ascension.

The only way to leave the strange circle is to stand outside the strange circle and look down on it from a high dimension.

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As mentioned in the previous RCT article, the game is a simulator created by humans, and its dimension is lower than that of humans. In other words, if we think that human beings are in a three-dimensional world, then the game world is two-dimensional. In essence, it is just trying to win the favor of the real master—human beings through simulation.

Two-dimensional? Obviously those 3A masterpieces with beautiful pictures have already allowed people to experience the possibilities of an open world in it.

Indeed, in this era, games are not like hundreds of thousands of years ago, only playing chess, playing cards and other simple forms. After the birth of the computer, with the brain opening of programmers and designers, the openness of the game has increased a lot. Now everyone experiences various masterpieces on Steam, NS, and PS5, and many of them are open-ended content. You can fight monsters and upgrade in the game, fall in love and get married in the game, or work hard to make money in the game. The open-ended storyline seems to develop countless variations based on your in-game actions.

Interestingly, let's change the perspective. Suppose your mother is watching you play games. Guess what she sees?

All she saw was an Internet-addicted teenager who was addicted to dealing with a bunch of codes on the server through a controller.

The countless endings in the game are just countless code settings, and there is no infinite opening in fact. The boundaries of the game are tightly framed within the scope of the code, and the colorful characters in the game are just props.

As a human being in a three-dimensional world, your mother only needs a power button to make everything disappear without a trace. If it is just right, the results of your few weeks of hard work may be wiped out.

Human beings cover the sky with one hand.

But this has inadvertently constituted the first puzzle piece of the metaverse-the game world under the complete control of humans.

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The emergence of blockchain technology is like opening Pandora's box and creating a new game world - chain games. However, many of the current chain games have not brought a qualitative leap to traditional games. They are more like an upgraded version of the patch. What's worse, this patch even completely lags behind traditional games in terms of experience. The slow confirmation speed on the Internet, the lack of game categories, etc. are all patch bugs.

So where is the upgrade?

The function of this patch is not to change the content and form of the game, which is the nature of the game being subordinate to humans, but to change the relationship between traditional games being controlled by humans at a single point. The current server will not disappear because of a team's abandonment of maintenance. The relationship between the game and humans has changed from a 1-to-1 mapping to a 1-to-many mapping, but there is no doubt that humans are still the masters of the game. The power of life and death is still in the hands of human beings. It's not that smart contracts cannot be changed, but require a wider range of human participation to change.

This brings us to the second piece of the metaverse puzzle - the decentralized game world nested on top of the first piece. In my opinion, this part of the ascension constitutes at most a 2D to 2.1D ascension.

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This concept, which was born with the blockchain from the very beginning, has penetrated into every corner of the industry. Let’s put aside other perspectives here, and only focus on the role and status of digital currency in games, blockchain games, and the complete metaverse in the future .

There is no currency in traditional games, only bridges.

What is the difference between a bridge and a currency? The bridge has a clear opposite bank, and the currency can be a channel that can be changed at will, and it does not necessarily need to specify a destination at the beginning of the acquisition. In the game, I found a cute and pitiful little girl NPC on the side of the road. I wanted to lend a helping hand and donate a handful of gold coins to her. Sorry, the plot does not have this degree of freedom. Your gold coins can buy the preset top-level equipment made of gold, but you can't give it to others at will.

The key step in turning a bridge into a currency is that it can be freely transferred, and even discarded. The protagonist of the game can choose to transfer the gold coins he holds, or throw the gold coins on the ground, or hide them in the leaves , essentially the program code should allow this.

Solving the problem of point-to-point transfer of currency feels like the natural mission of the blockchain, so in chain games, currency has the function of point-to-point transfer at will, and can also be easily set to transfer, buy and sell among game characters. To some extent, the currency in chain games is close to the replica of the real human economic and social currency.

We all know that the Federal Reserve issued U.S. dollars with treasury bonds as collateral. The central bank is such a role. It measures how much currency the economic world needs, and it injects currency according to its own estimation.

The players in the chain game, that is, the human beings with these carbon-based life behind the game, also play the role of the central bank. They inject liquidity into the chain game system by using fiat currency or BTC/ETH to purchase digital currency. The US dollar is behind the national debt, and the digital currency in the chain game is behind the more reliable legal currency/BTC/ETH.

The reproduction of this attribute cannot avoid the basic problems of human society, the mismatch between the currency system and the demand system. That is to say, in the chain game system, the currency volume required by the characters, props or other functions in the game is not really considered, but the exogenous nature injects an initial estimated liquidity into it, which is also The central bank is often criticized by economists.

① Currency in chain games - game characters VS ② Currency in reality - real human beings

This is a set of isomorphisms.

③ Digital currency in the Metaverse - silicon-based life VS ④ Ideal form of currency - carbon-based life

This is also a set of isomorphisms.

Central banks play a pivotal role in today's monetary system. But in fact, the original intention of the central bank is to bring the current real currency system (2 above) closer to the real ideal currency form (4 above), that is, it is best to meet various liquidity needs at the same time , does not produce economic bubbles.

For this goal alone, our economic system has developed a huge hierarchical system such as the central bank/primary underwriter/commercial bank/private sector.

On the other hand, the current digital currency (reaching ③) has already possessed the functions and responsibilities it can undertake, programmable, adaptable, and technically achievable when the environment of metaverse and silicon-based life is not yet perfect. Generate annihilation on demand.

The importance of this to the formation of the Metaverse is self-evident. For silicon-based life, when they produce their own survival needs, such as electricity and energy, they need a method to obtain the necessary raw materials to support life, then this method must not be a legal currency that is completely controlled by humans System, even the fiat currency in the banking system is a digital form that they can read, but the difference is that the person behind it can stop an account, or even actively freeze and clear it.

If life is parasitic on such means of payment, life is undoubtedly handed over to carbon-based life. What they need is a free-breathing digital currency native to the metaverse dimension, and carbon-based life cannot intervene.

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Just as the obstacle that human beings cannot overcome is the link between the body and the mind, that is, consciousness, this mysterious thing that seems to be able to observe human beings independently of human beings. It seems that various neurosciences, complex sciences have not fully explained where conscious consciousness comes from or what it is.

But even so, smart scientists have a solution—brain-computer interfaces. We do not need to open the black box of consciousness, but can transfer this box intact directly to silicon-based life. Then the functions of the human body can be replaced by silicon-based ones through simulation, and the part of consciousness can be directly implanted into silicon-based life through the brain machine. Such a final complex can basically make a complete silicon-based life up.

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The whole picture of the Metaverse painting?

Some people say that the oasis in Ready Player One is like a picture of the Metaverse. But in my opinion, this is not a perfect answer. The characters in the oasis correspond to the real world one by one. In essence,It is a projection of the real world, the two worlds are completely separated, and only connected by a game somatosensory device, this is not the real metaverse.

I clearly remember the shock brought to me by "Love, death, robot" S01E01 (recommended with a picture or gif). After the heroine was pierced, I thought this was the ending of the tragedy. I didn't expect this to be the reverse In the beginning, the robot-like creature that fought was the real mother, while the carbon-based creature with human appearance was just the object to be manipulated. If you want to ask me what is Metaverse, I want to answer that this is the real metaverse in my mind.

In the metaverse, there are both silicon-based organisms and carbon-based organisms (maybe it is debatable whether they should be called human beings, let us call them organisms), carbon-based organisms and silicon-based organisms. Organisms are in the same dimension, not to say that the current carbon-based organisms will always be above silicon-based organisms. Carbon-based organisms can create silicon-based organisms below their dimensions, and silicon-based organisms can also create carbon-based organisms below their dimensions.

Carbon-based creatures still want to dominate, sorry, you can't. Self-contained silicon-based organisms are already capable enough to protect their own lives, do you want to unplug the power, that's ok, I have my own creation of simulated carbon-based organisms to plug the power back on, and even end carbon-based organisms if necessary lives to protect themselves.

Carbon-based and silicon-based countries have their own cultural politics. If you want to negotiate business with silicon-based organisms, you can. We only accept digital currency for business payment. No, it doesn’t matter, there are acceptors between the two countries.

In life, the concept of life has been generalized, and carbon-based organisms can no longer dominate themselves. Maybe the steel plate under your feet is the arm of a silicon-based organism, which can drive you off at any time.

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The formation process of the metaverse is the process of human beings step by step upgrading low-dimensional creatures to three-dimensional creatures equal to human beings. The final result seems to be to add a more intense competing species to the originally competitive human society. However, going back to the topic discussed at the beginning, if the goal of human beings is to evolve to a higher dimension, the current form alone is weak, and with the help of silicon-based organisms, human beings have a better chance of achieving it. Organisms evolve and become higher-dimensional life forms.

And the Metaverse will be the culture medium for all of this.

Burning from the ashes, Nirvana is reborn!