The Blockchain, a cryptographically linked list with additional restrictions, is often touted to be the most significant innovation towards democratization of the digital landscape, especially the Internet. However, the ideas did not come out of thin air, but have ancestors and relatives. An attempt at technological genealogy.
The Blockchain, a cryptographically linked list with additional restrictions, is often touted to be the most significant innovation towards democratization of the digital landscape, especially the Internet. However, the ideas did not come out of thin air, but have ancestors and relatives. An attempt at technological genealogy.
The timestamping act proper was to be performed by a trusted third party, the Time-Stamping Service (TSS), using standard digital signatures. Cryptographically, a timestamp is indistinguishable from a digital signature; the key difference lies in the semantics:
A conventional digital signature is used to attest authorship of or agreement with the signed contents. Similar to pen and paper signatures, most digital signatures include the date and time at which the signing took place, as ancillary information.
In a timestamp, on the other hand, the date and time is the primary information. It can (and, for some protocols, does) use the same algorithms and message formats as digital signatures above. The signature itself does not imply the signer’s endorsement of the contents; it only implies that any document which matches the timestamp, already existed at that time (assuming the security of the underlying cryptographic algorithms). An example of such a timestamping protocol is outlined in RFC 3161 (2001).
Haber and Stornetta were unhappy to have to completely trust the TSS to not issue timestamps for anything else than the current time, especially their ability at backdating documents, so they proposed two distributed mechanisms which could be used to ascertain (or refute) the honesty of the TSS.
One of the mechanisms would today probably be described as a Distributed Ledger, one of the main properties of blockchains. Unlike blockchains, where the entire database is replicated, they proposed an optimization: Anybody requesting a timestamp would be given information about the next k timestamped documents. This information included the sequence number of the timestamp, the hash of the document, and the ID of the requestor.
As a timestamping client, it was in your own best interest to safeguard this information in addition to the actual timestamp itself. In case of a dispute, you could produce these k additional records and upon contacting their requestors, they would be able to ascertain the fact that your document was timestamped before theirs.
In essence, we have a distributed ledger where everyone has the incentive to store some small piece of information which can be used in their interest.
PGP Digital Timestamping Service (1995)
In 1995, Matthew Richardson created the PGP Digital Timestamping Service. At this time, email was still one of the main machine-to-machine (M2M) interfaces, as there were still hosts without always-on connectivity. Therefore, it was natural to use email as the interface. One of the modes was (and still is today) to send a document or hash thereof to the stamper services’ email address. A few minutes later, a PGP-digitally-signed version of your submission is returned, including a timestamp and a monotonic sequence number.
Richardson did not want to put the burden of safekeeping to the end user. Instead, his system creates daily and weekly summaries of the timestamps it issued, allowing anyone to double-check the timestamps issued against these lists.
For many years, the weekly summaries were also posted to the Usenet group [url=https://groups.google.com/g/comp.security.pgp.announce]comp.security.pgp.announce[/url], which—like most “announce”-Newsgroups—would be automatically archived by many servers around the world.
Software development, especially in teams, have used version control software since the 1970s to keep track of parallel development, experiments, bug fixes, or to determine how bugs got introduced into the system. Traditionally, this has been based on version numbers and central repositories, neither of which worked well when trying to create derivative works: The need for distributed version control systems (DVCS) was born.
In 2001, the first such system, GNU arch, was created. However, DVCSes only really became popular after the introduction of git and it’s use in Linux kernel development in 2005.
DVCS enable every developer to keep a local copy of (part of) the source code and create modifications, some of them which might later be shared with other developers, including the original ones.
Instead of version numbers, which cannot be easily kept unique in such a distributed setting, unique hashes were used to identify the versions. In Git, these hashes are derived from the parent’s hash (or hashes, in case of a merge; see image to the right), the new contents, as well as information about who changed what when and why. The committed version can also contain a PGP signature to authenticate the changes.
Again, we have a cryptographically linked chain (actually, Directed Acyclic Graph, DAG), potentially with signatures, and a protocol to efficiently distribute changes. This again can be used to create a public record.
In addition (and unlike the Blockchain approach which we will see below), diverging changes are common and a process (“merge”) exists to combine the work done in each branch and not waste the efforts invested. This merge can often be done automatically.
Blockchain (2008)
The term Blockchain became known in 2008, born as a distributed ledger of pseudonymous financial transactions in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. As in Git, each block includes the hash of its predecessor as a backward link (i.e., opposite to the logical ordering shown by the arrows in the image to the right, where time flows down).
To avoid blocks being chained randomly, a proof of work (PoW) is required: Only blocks containing a solution to a cryptographic puzzle will be considered as candidate blocks; the complexity of that puzzle is regularly adjusted to match the computational power in the network, keeping the average block creation (aka “mining”) rate at roughly 1 every 10 minutes.
If multiple candidate blocks are available as potential parents, only one is chosen; the work done in different branches is thrown away, even if these blocks/branches do not contain conflicting transactions.
The key to Bitcoin’s success was that apparent democratization through the proof of work. However, concerns about wasting energy have resulted in alternate designs, notably
private blockchains, where only a select set of participants are allowed to maintain blocks and new blocks are accepted based on algorithms related to majority voting.
In the former case, PoS, also called “plutocracy” by some, the “democracy” patina is diluted even further.
In the latter case, depending on the use case, often a much simpler mechanism may be used, resulting in easier-to-maintain systems. However, often the apparent sexyness of the “Blockchain” name is more important. For example, when only a single organization controls the entire blockchain, this reverts back to the case of a single TSS, which Haber and Stornetta worked hard to avoid, as there is no guarantee that the system works as advertised. Even if it does, the lack of transparency, functionality, and battle-testing may even be much less than what is readily available with Git and friends. On the right-hand side, you find a rendering of the qualitative complexity of different mechanisms that are embodied in the Bitcoin Blockchain. Integrity and transparency, the two main goals often associated with Blockchain usage, are very easy to fulfill. The incremental cost of immutability (or tamper-evidence) on top of these two is small. Itis provably impossible to achieve perfect Consensus in asynchronous distributed systems such as the Internet; however, “good enough” approximations can be achieved. Preventing double-spending of cryptocurrency is even harder. In many use cases, the easy three are enough, maybe with a sprinkle of very controlled consensus. Going for the big bubble is therefore mostly wasting resources and adding unnecessary complexity or preventing simple fixes in case of errors.
the fear, that transaction costs might explode, or
the wish of project participants to promote their respective pet solutions.
“Blockchain” is a heavily overloaded (and thus diluted) term. In its original form, it promised transparency and immutability, achieving that at huge amounts of energy wasted by people typically driven by greed. In what is sold to corporate users, it is often (1) unnecessarily complicated and error-prone, (2) not adapted to the actual problem, or (3) just little more than what Git and friends readily provide, but costly relabeled with a sexy buzzword.
Zeitgitter (2019)
As explained above, often all that is needed is
integrity,
transparency,
immutability (or tamper-evidence), and
maybe a limited, well-defined form of consensus.
This is achievable with simple timestamping. With the know-how from Haber-Stornetta, the PGP Digital Timestamping Service, and Git in mind, we created the open-source solution Zeitgitter.
The name comes from the German mental health term Zeitgitterstörung, which translates to confusion of the sense of time or chronotaraxis. So, Zeitgitter itself (without Störung, which is the confusion part) might be translated as the sense of time. It also includes Gitter, which means grid and indicates that the different timestampers are interwoven, mutually interlocking each other into having to say the truth about their timestamps.
The basic design is as follows: Each timestamping server issues digital signatures on content stored in Git repositories and stores proof of this timestamping in a Git repository of its own. In regular intervals, the Zeitgitter timestamping servers cross-timestamp each other, preventing backdating timestamps by more than a short interval.
Basic integration is trivial: Just call [url=https://pypi.org/project/git-timestamp/]git timestamp[/url] whenever you want your standard Git repository timestamped (or automate the process). This easily fits in with the Git ecosystem and automated timestamping is easy.
In contrast to Blockchain-based approaches, already an inexpensive Raspberry Pi can issue several million timestamps per day, with annual cost for device, power, and Internet access being on the order of just a few €/$/CHF, avoiding the need for massive monetary returns.
PGP-based Zeitgitter results in normal signed objects in the repository. Therefore, timestamps can be stored, presented, verified, or propagated like ordinary Git objects; fully decentralized. Blockchain-based timestamping approaches, however, require a centralized gatekeeper to verify or help verify the timestamp; i.e., the timestamp is not self-contained.
Zeitgitter addresses the most common need, namely timestamping, to efficiently ascertain integrity, transparency, and detect tampering. When it comes to issuing timestamps, the requirements for global consensus are very easy to satisfy, unlike many other applications.
If a single authority would like to add these three features, this is all of Blockchain that is needed.
Summary
Most often, “Blockchain” is sold as the solution for all your problems around Digitalisation of your business or administration. However, often the problems lie deeper: The lack of defined processes, missing standardized interchange formats, or even just not knowing well enough what the real goals of the entire digitalisation project should be.
These all-too-common problems resulted in the adage,
If you think that you need a Blockchain: By the time that you are ready to use it, you probably don’t need it anymore.
Even if some of the features are actually required, probably all that you need is timestamping, which can be much more easily achieved using RFC 3161 (centralized) timestamping protocol or Zeitgitter as a distributed version.
An extended version of this article, with a slightly different focus, will be presented in German at DigiGes Winterkongress 2022.
Updates
2022-03-06: At the beginning of the Haber/Stornetta section, elaborated on the relationship between digital signatures and timestamps (and mentioned RFC 3161).
This is the time to catch up on what you missed during the year. For some, it is meeting the family. For others, doing snowsports. For even others, it is cuddling up and reading. This is an article for the latter.
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Pro Senectute beider Basel, a foundation to help the elderly around Basel, launched its NFT project last week and already informed about its Metaverse commitment beforehand. According to a media release, Michael Harr, managing director of the 15-million Basel-based company, wants to use the purchase of these “properties” in a “central location” in two online… Read more: Rejuvenation for Pro Senectute through NFT and Metaverse?
Mit nicht weniger als fünf Blockchains sollte sichergestellt werden, dass der digitale Impfnachweis in Deutschland fälschungssicher ist. Der Plan sorgte für Spott und Kritik – nun kommt alles anders.
Rejuvenation for Pro Senectute through NFT and Metaverse?
Pro Senectute beider Basel, a foundation to help the elderly around Basel, launched its NFT project last week and already informed about its Metaverse commitment beforehand. According to a media release, Michael Harr, managing director of the 15-million Basel-based company, wants to use the purchase of these “properties” in a “central location” in two online worlds to promote solidarity between the generations and enable older people to use current and future digital technologies, promote their integration and reduce social isolation.
We wanted to take a look at what “central location” actually means in an online world called “Decentraland”. Decentraland measures 5 km by 5 km and the Pro Senectute presence can be found 500 m from the edge of the city, i.e. on the outer 10% of the buildable space. The view from the roof of the anarchy café right next door also screams anything but “central!”: a deserted environment as far as the eye can see and on the other side of the street a seemingly endless steppe. Neither walking around nor several return visits did change that.
But Michael Harr’s vision goes far beyond today: “Where will we reach older people in the distant future and how do get to interact with them?”
A behind-the-scenes look at metaverses and NFTs help us understand whether this goal can be achieved. The view from the roof of the neighboring Anarchy Café of the Pro-Senectute double parcel in Decentraland (bottom left, black), the main road (center), and the steppe landscape (right)
According to Wikipedia, a metaverse is a digital space created by the interaction of virtual, augmented and physical reality. Neal Stephenson created the term 30 years ago for an online world that allows its users to escape, at least temporarily, from the dystopia of “Snow Crash.” The term “metaverse” became known to a wider audience when Facebook was renamed Meta.
More than 200 such virtual 3D experience spaces are offered by various companies today. Analogous to social media platforms, these metaverses also try to differentiate themselves from each other through incompatibility and lock-in mechanisms: “customer loyalty” by means of walled gardens.
Accordingly, customers also have to make multiple commitments. Pro Senectute beider Basel has acquired “plots of land in two of these metaverses, Decentraland and The Sandbox, with the vision of one day building a virtual course center or a virtual counseling center with a meeting place there” (Harr). Currently, metaverse architects are still being sought for this.
Let’s take a closer look at these two metaverses.
Metaverse 1: Decentraland
View from the street to the construction site with a stylish “Under Construction” sign (left of the lettering). Neighborhood, from left to right: Anarchist Café, Menstruation Pyramid, Canadian Law Firm. For new Decentraland users, getting started is a snap if you speak English: Visit play.decentraland.org in your browser and select that you want to play as a guest (and, depending on your computer, dismiss the message that your graphics performance is insufficient). Some loading time later you are greeted by an introduction that explains how to roam the virtual world with a combination of mouse and keyboard known from first person shooters. With a jump into the cold water (literally) you arrive in the city center with many buildings, but not a single other player.
Inexperienced in first person shooters, slightly disoriented, and annoyed by the sometimes suddenly materializing walls, I try to locate the “central location” (coordinates -38,120 and -38,121) on the map. Decentraland map at maximum zoom: Still not enough to see the Pro Senectute “plot” (it is far further “north”). Despite the maximum zoom level, the map only shows a good third of the way to the Pro Senectute. In the chat, however, you can enter “/goto -38,120“, as one of the omnipresent in-game advertising posters will explain to me later. (The owners of some Decentraland parcel want to lure me from the “central” Pro Senectute vicinity to their actual location, probably also somewhere else “central”).
The double lot currently consists only of a black wall, with a floating(!) writing “Pro Senectute beider Basel” in front and a shy “Under Construction” sign next to it, evoking memories of 90s websites.
The environment of the online presence (or better, absence?) of Pro Senectute is still relatively empty. Why the choice fell on this “site” is not clear to me. Neither the neighboring Canadian law firm, nor the advertising for a menstruation app behind it really seems tailored to Swiss seniors. The view from 50 m “southeast” of the parcels. But maybe some of the male senior citizens will admire the oversized pin-up girl of the NFT discount store a few steps in the southeasterly direction of the plot. At least one can spend some of the waiting time until the opening of the course center.
Metaverse 2: The Sandbox
Sandbox map showing the parcel and neighborhood. For The Sandbox, you are forced to create an account, which we managed only after several attempts. Then it turns out that a separate application is needed, which is not compatible with my computer.
A colleague has a compatible computer and can finally start playing after several gigabytes of download. However, the operation of The Sandbox is not intuitive enough for him to navigate to the “premium” coordinates of Pro Senectute.
If two computer scientists are already reaching their limits, what does it look like for senior citizens? Presumably, they first have to go to the physical course center in downtown Basel, where they are then told how to get to the virtual course center.
Early metaverses
Second Life is greeting more friendly, both in language (German) and graphics. Since the 1980s, online games have been used for the first social interactions, at that time still text-based. Online worlds then experienced a somewhat greater degree of popularity starting in 2003 with the 3D world of Second Life or with online role-playing games like World of Warcraft. Today’s metaverses hope to escape this niche existence.
Both Second Life and World of Warcraft, though much older, feature more realistic (and in my opinion, friendlier) graphics than the Pro Senectute selection.
Interaction metaverse
The floor plan of a community WorkAdventure (left, with a glimpse at the expansive garden outside the office) with our avatars. Meeting in the lounge automatically and intuitively starts a video conference among those present. Spring 2020 marked the beginning of home office for many. With Workadventure, a few Frenchmen created a platform that allowed them to recover some of the social aspects of their usual office into their home office. The result was an open platform where anyone could create their own 2½D scenes. Most implementations recreated office worlds with meeting rooms and lounges. Anyone hanging around in the same lounge would automatically join a joint video conference, a very natural form of interaction. In addition, however, there is also possibility to connect objects with websites or other workadventures: Pinboards can thus display information from the intranet or doors lead to other Workadventure metaverses, in the open style of the web and its links. All with the goal of enabling informal social exchange in clear yet friendly virtual worlds. Workadventure scenery is not restricted to boring office worlds, but can also be colorful, such as in this world targeted at school children.
“NFT” stands for “Non-Fungible Token”, roughly a “non-exchangeable token”. The “non-exchangeable” serves to distinguish it from “normal”, exchangeable tokens such as digital coins: Any digital dollar can be exchanged for any other digital dollar and no one will notice.
These NFTs are being marketed by some as the future of digital art (and for much more). For this purpose, a program is stored on the blockchain, a so-called “smart contract”, through which these works of art can be traded. These trade changes and the payments made for them are also stored back on the Blockchain. Interestingly, however, the artwork itself is not in the blockchain; only the URL (web address) is stored in the smart contract.
Perpetual: The NFT is managed by a public “digital contract” (“smart contract”). These smart contracts and each associated transaction are elaborately (and contrary to ideas of privacy) kept publicly and virtually immutable in a blockchain “forever.” (But that alone is not enough for them to also retain their function).
Hurdle: The contract, however, does not pose a technical hurdle to viewing or even downloading the artwork. On the contrary, it points every blockchain user to where the artwork can be downloaded.
Trustworthiness:Some of these smart contracts “simply” charge a fee when they are resold (sometimes as a surprise); others are actively malicious (e.g., they steal crypto-money or NFTs); quite a few are buggy and can be abused by hackers. An ordinary user does not have the tools to determine this before bindingly interacting with the contract.
Bug fixes: Many smart contracts do not offer the possibility of a software update, which could correct errors or security vulnerabilities. This is because this update option can also be (and has already been) abused.
Goodwill: There is no cure for faulty or malicious smart contracts. Not even against simple typing errors during the transfer. Recourse is impossible, so is an appeal to a court. Hoping for generosity on the part of the other party is also impossible by design: The smart contract program, once started, acts completely stubbornly and autonomously and cannot be influenced by anything or anyone (“Code is Law”: The program code is the only valid, first- and last-instance law).
Contract: This “digital contract” probably does not even correspond to what the Code of Obligations understands by a contract, since consent to such an incomprehensible construct cannot be seen as an expression of will. In the event of deceipt (which is easily possible with smart contracts), there is also no possibility for subsequent correction, for example by annulling or correcting the contract.
Uniqueness: The alleged uniqueness of NFTs is an illusion. Likewise, without additional, sometimes time-consuming research, it is not possible to verify whether the creator of the NFT is also the owner of the copyright or right of use to the work of art. (In other words, the fact that something is sold as an NFT says nothing about its authenticity or whether it is copied/faked).
Free of charge: Transactions around smart contracts (even just moving them between the owner’s left and right pocket) cost money, or more precisely, “cryptocurrencies”. These are not currencies in the classic sense, as they lack both a functioning monetary cycle and the necessary stability.
Value: Quantifying the value of art reliably and objectively is already an impossibility. It becomes even more difficult when the yardstick for this, the cryptocurrency, is itself highly speculative and can only be kept alive, as it were, by a snowball system.
Simplicity and democracy: This blockchain was created in 2008 as an alternative to an economic system dominated by a few people and characterized by greed, inefficiency, intransparency and excessive complexity. However, the economic system created by blockchains is riddled with concentrated greed, inefficiency, intransparency, and unnecessary complexity. And, despite the regularly repeated promises of fairness and democratization through the blockchain, the financial power behind it is in the hands of very few people with sometimes very strange ideas about the society we should all live in.
In short, a very complex, opaque and unclear system is being set up without any possibility for appeal or mercy, which tramples on our rights to privacy and – despite all protestations of fairness and distribution – actually only benefits a few (newly) rich.
The use of NFTs does not fundamentally change the problems of funding the arts or nonprofit organizations: Neither the often unfair access to audiences, the often unfair pay, nor the often difficult access to upfront investment. It also isn’t a step into an entirely new arts culture or arts funding culture. (Or, in the case of Pro Senectute, donation culture).
On the contrary, in my opinion, it is not only without benefit, but even harmful to society in the long term.
Goals reached?
Now, do NFTs and the selected metaverses fulfill the goals of Pro Senectute beider Basel? Let’s first look at the goals around the NFTs:
NFT goals
A. Unique property?
In its media release, Pro Senectute beider Basel writes: “An NFT maps a digital certificate of ownership and thus represents a unique, non-copyable original on the blockchain.”
Let’s take this one step at a time:
Certificate of ownership: What rights one acquires to the work through the action is not clear from either the media release or the NFT website. My request for clarification was not answered.
Unique: Thereare up to 2512 copies of the individual works. Can one really speak of “unique”‽
Not copyable: The NFT stored on the public blockchain only points to a “normal” (also public) URL. A download (and thus the creation of a local copy) is therefore possible from any computer without restrictions.
Original: In the digital world, there is no difference between original and copy.
On the Blockchain: the works themselves are not on the Blockchain, only references and proofs of purchase.
In short: the sentence from the media release bears—generously speaking—barely any relation to reality.
I would not want the three most common NFTs even if gifted, even less so for money. (Nevertheless, I bought one of the NFTs — for analysis purposes).
C. Paper Wallet
The NFTs are sent as a “paper wallet“; a QR code printed on high quality paper for viewing the work and a scratch area which initially hides the information required for resale.
Such a paper wallet has the advantage that the buyers do not have to take care of the cryptocurrencies and crypto wallets (=online cryptocurrency account). However, it also has the disadvantage that one only finds out after a fee-based “resale” to oneself whether one has really acquired a right to this NFT or whether the same envelope with the same access data was simply sent out 4444 times.
Also unclear is how many hands the secrets under the scratch field passed through before the scratch was applied (contogeneration, transmission, printing process) and how many people could thus also lay a digital claim to the artwork. (The blockchain does not say who is the rightful owner now; any person who knows the secrets under the scratch-off can resell it on their behalf).
In response to my question, Michael Harr explained that he was prepared. A print shop had been chosen that also handled sensitive data (e.g. lottery tickets) and could guarantee confidentiality. In addition, further security measures were taken. The paper wallets also had some credit so that no additional costs would be incurred for the first transfer of ownership worth around one centime.
However, the question about the rights acquired with the NFT and the characteristics of the smart contract remained unanswered and thus unclear.
Pro Senectute beider Basel will inform about the outcome after the end of the activity, which will last at least until spring. Only then we will have a chance to determine whether this has led to additional revenue or whether those willing to donate have simply changed their method of giving.
But even that conclusion will hardly show whether these new channels are sustainable or just a flash in the pan.
Metaverse goals
A. Participation in progress?
The media release motivates the creation of these “Metaverse branches” with “let[ting] the older generation actively participate [in] technological advances.” Is this the sight of the future? (Splash screen for The Sandbox) Both platforms try to motivate players to spend cryptocurrency on all sorts of in-game extras. If you are not careful, you can quickly lose a lot of money.
In particular, The Sandbox seems to be a Minecraft clone trimmed for monetization, coming across on the splash page with the combined charm of a back-alley gambling joint and a Formula-1 overall. Monetization: You are not worthy to be saved unless you finish the level. We beg to question whether these two rather bleak, English-only worlds with their obtrusive monetization, omnipresent advertising, and sometimes rather unintuitive interface are really (1) the ideal environment to lure seniors into and (2) give these platforms as well as the underlying cryptocurrencies legitimacy through one’s presence. Decentraland is full of advertisements. Including advertisement for advertisements. And advertisement for NFTs. And then even more advertisement for NFTs. The abilities to critically scrutinize, tend to decline with age (think of the inglorious grandparent scams). Exposing possibly cash-strapped seniors to such heavily monetized platforms seems dangerous, to say the least, especially if other participants on these platforms then try to lure these seniors with possible extravagant profits (through money games or NFT “investments”).
B. Prediction for 40 years?
In the shockingly uncritical SRF News article, Michael Harr’s target audience is quoted as “people who are 30 or 40 years old today will use when they themselves are of retirement age”.
I think it is extremely daring to try and predict today which technologies will still be relevant in 30 to 40 years.
Looking back, 40 years ago, the end of the Iron Curtain was unimaginable and the Internet in its current form had not yet been born; 30 years ago, the WWW was just one year old and known only to some insiders. Today, hardly anyone can imagine that smartphones with touchscreens have only been around for 15 years, much shorter than the forecast period.
It is impossible today to make predictions about whether a specific platform of a given technology selected now will even exist then, especially when even large platforms face an uncertain future.
In the metaverse, you can be teleported to any possible coordinate at any time within a few seconds. At first glance, this seems to imply that the concept of “central location” completely loses its meaning we have from the real world. Nevertheless, there are significant price differences between properties at different locations. Researchers at the University of Basel, for example, have analyzed the prices of the original auction that was used to find many Decentraland “properties” their first owners five years ago.
They published their conclusions last year, long before the current Pro Senectute purchases: Buyers were willing to pay significantly higher prices for a “good location” in 2017.
Fabian Schär, one of the authors of the study, explains: “The metaverse is an attention economy. Similar to the physical world, those parcels that have a high density of visitors, i.e. are located near large squares, main roads or important districts, are particularly sought-after. In addition, parcels with memorable coordinates also fetch significantly higher prices. This aspect is reminiscent of markets for domain names where similar effects can be observed.”
Regardless of location, all land purchases in the Metaverse are high-risk investments, he adds. “As interesting as the subject matter may be, potential buyers of virtual land parcels must always be aware that they can lose everything.”
According to a recent study by Wemeta, the value of The Sandbox and Decentraland properties has plummeted by 80% and demand has also declined, in Decentraland by a factor of 6.
How “central” is the location really? The Pro Senectute properties in Decentraland are only 10% away from the “northern” edge.
The coordinate -38,120 doesn’t seem particularly memorable either, so that can’t be it either.
The Canadian lawyer’s office or the menstruation app “west” of the Pro Senectute location are also unlikely to attract many walk-in customers. Nor will the aforementioned abandoned Anarchy NFT Café with its viewing terrace or the NFT Discount with its pin-up girl storefront. The use of the buildings in the direction of “north” is unclear and in the direction of “east” is undeveloped steppe as far as the eye can see.
“Central?” Apparently not. Further research shows: The steppe to the east is actually a huge university campus. The map shows no points of interest, so I take a stroll. Some zig-zagging later, I discover an (empty) building with a periodic table and a lectern. But even that will hardly attract streams of visitors.
D. Reduce isolation?
In the press release, Michael Harr, the foundation’s manager, is quoted as saying: “We want to promote the integration of the older generation and reduce social isolation.”
The seniors I interviewed expressed their belief that such worlds would promote isolation instead. Some had already enjoyed using an online Jass app remotely. Together with a parallel audio or video call, this had almost recreated the pleasurable feeling of sitting at a table together.
“Thanks to VR glasses, people with disabilities can experience things that are not possible in analog. It is conceivable, for example, that an elderly person in a wheelchair can experience the view from a mountaintop thanks to VR glasses,” explains Michael Harr in a response to my inquiry.
The view from the top of the mountain (or even the way there) could be experienced without a metaverse, without anything but a web browser. Not every 3D representation has to be locked into a commercial platform. “Locking in” also aptly describes the minute amounts of data that can be stored for a Decentraland parcel; far too little for a realistic mountain panorama. (This limit also explains why the five year old world still shows only minimalistic graphics).
The Decentraland property of Pro Senectute is 16×32 m². The (small-looking) auditorium mentioned above is twice the size; some form of classroom could certainly be accommodated in half of it. The question is rather, how would courses be held there? So far, there seem to be no mechanisms in Decentraland that support knowledge transfer, even ignoring the already mentioned very restrictive storage limits). It is also hard to imagine that better knowledge transfer than with specialized tools (or even just a video conference) will ever be possible in these metaverses.
Conclusion
The fundamental question is whether a world of hypercapitalism is the right environments to attract seniors into: Their more or less subtle ubiquitous monetization of almost every corner, their aspects of gambling, and their attempts at sensory overload, especially through omnipresent advertising does not seem a platform I would feel comfortable advertising to a wide range of seniors. Instead, if I had the say at an organization catering to a wide spectrum of elderly people, I would propagate a reduced, more comprehensible, intuitive and user-friendly environment, catering for the reduced receptiveness and critical faculties of age.
Seniors I interviewed would rather enjoy the sun than invest so much time in a confusing system. For digital communication, they would prefer the telephone or a video call. Incidentally, such a call is also an excellent basis for starting a joint online Jass.
None of these statements should be taken as endorsement to keep interested seniors from exploring online worlds, on the contrary. My respondents, if they had to visit one of the Metaverses, would prefer the more intuitive, natural environment of Second Life over Decentraland any day.
Many of the other statements of Michael Harr were — as explained above — hard for me to understand. Therefore I asked the Pro Senectute beider Basel for further information. I hoped that they could give me information about concepts or background considerations, the total costs and their financing. If the initial financing was “not from donations”, then where was it from? (Hopefully also not from the operation of the retirement homes or the earmarked public funds, the three together making up about 90% of the foundation’s budget). Likewise, I asked for information about what the features (and costs) of the smart contract were, as well as how the security of the production process of the paper wallet would be ensured. The response 1½ weeks later rarely addressed my specific questions. A commendable exception is the explanation of the paper wallets and that the wallets have been topped up with sufficient cryptocurrency so the buyer can transfer ownership once without going through further hoops or expenses.
As with many other projects in the blockchain environment, the question about who will benefit from the project remains unanswered: Will only the early entrants and the consultants earn anything, or will it add a sustainable value to our society.
Part of this ambiguity probably arises from the lack of clear distinction in communication between what is being worked on today and where Pro Senectute beider Basel sees itself in 30 or 40 years.
Many ambiguities could have been clarified by a statement such as, “With a portion of the maximum 300,000 francs from the NFT proceeds, we want to explore how we might best interact with seniors a few decades.” At present, neither such a statement nor apparently a sufficiently deep understanding of what the various envisioned technologies can and definitely cannot do seem to exist.
If hyped technology and its effects are only superficially understood, there is a great risk of incorrect assessments and wrong decisions. It remains to be hoped that, despite the signs to the contrary, the added value for society will prevail in this case. And perhaps there will be some money left over for the current generation.
This is the time to catch up on what you missed during the year. For some, it is meeting the family. For others, doing snowsports. For even others, it is cuddling up and reading. This is an article for the latter.
As an avid reader, you know my arguments that neither NFT nor smart contracts live up to their promises, and that the blockchain underneath is also more fragile and has a worse cost-benefit ratio than most believe. Similarly, I also claim the same for the metaverses built on top of them all. And that the… Read more: NFTs are unethical
Bureaucracy and inefficiency are frowned upon, often rightly so. But they also have their good sides: Properly applied, they ensure reliability and legal certainty. Blockchain disciples want to “improve” bureaucracy-ridden processes, but achieve the opposite. Two examples:
Yesterday, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) released its indictment against Sam Bankman-Fried. It details the financial entanglements of FTX, Alameda Research and more than a hundred other companies and individuals. We have tried to disentangle these allegations somewhat for you.
Drew Austin raises an important question in Wired: How should we deal with our accumulated personal data? How can we get from randomly hoarding to selection and preservation? And why does his proposed solution of Web3 not work out? A few analytical thoughts.
Pro Senectute beider Basel, a foundation to help the elderly around Basel, launched its NFT project last week and already informed about its Metaverse commitment beforehand. According to a media release, Michael Harr, managing director of the 15-million Basel-based company, wants to use the purchase of these “properties” in a “central location” in two online… Read more: Rejuvenation for Pro Senectute through NFT and Metaverse?
An Bitcoin und Blockchain verdienten bisher die, die früh dabei waren. Nun wollen selbst Firmen profitieren, die eigentlich Zigarren oder Eistee herstellen.
The view from the roof of the neighboring Anarchy Café of the Pro-Senectute double parcel in Decentraland (bottom left, black), the main road (center), and the steppe landscape (right)
View from the street to the construction site with a stylish “Under Construction” sign (left of the lettering). Neighborhood, from left to right: Anarchist Café, Menstruation Pyramid, Canadian Law Firm.
Decentraland map at maximum zoom: Still not enough to see the Pro Senectute “plot” (it is far further “north”).
The view from 50 m “southeast” of the parcels.
Sandbox map showing the parcel and neighborhood.
Second Life is greeting more friendly, both in language (German) and graphics.
The floor plan of a community WorkAdventure (left, with a glimpse at the expansive garden outside the office) with our avatars. Meeting in the lounge automatically and intuitively starts a video conference among those present.
Workadventure scenery is not restricted to boring office worlds, but can also be colorful, such as in this world targeted at school children.
Is this the sight of the future? (Splash screen for The Sandbox)
Monetization: You are not worthy to be saved unless you finish the level.
Decentraland is full of advertisements. Including advertisement for advertisements. And advertisement for NFTs. And then even more advertisement for NFTs.
