1kx: Ethereum, a surreal online world

Original author: Peter pet 3 rpan

Original translation: Luffy, Foresight News

Everyone complains about cryptocurrency not having any real utility. But I would say it builds an interesting surreal online world.

Blockchain as a new medium for entertainment

The huge potential of blockchain in the entertainment sector has yet to be tapped. It is a cultural phenomenon that is already unfolding naturally.

Ethereum is loved not for its technology, but for the community that has grown around it, the culture that comes with it, the sense of purpose it gives people, the friends they make in the process, the opportunity to serve others and the ability to attract audiences; not to mention the endless drama, gossip, chaos and fun that it is filled with. Some want to achieve financial success sooner rather than later, some want to change the world, and many are in between, but all cherish the currency that represents ownership of this world: ETH.

Ethereum provides people with a game that is immersive, social, and meaningful.

While Ethereum today is highly evolved to become a general-purpose infrastructure for cryptocurrency use cases (e.g., payments, exchanges, collectibles), its greatest success is not as a backend for applications, but as an entire world in which people live, create, belong, and cultivate.

The Ethereum experience is hard to define, it’s strange and new. We haven’t come up with a serious name for the experience that belongs to it yet. In an effort to understand it, we may have over-rationalized it as a temporary state of cryptocurrencies. It’s a period of confusion, weirdness, and exploration, an attempt to collectively understand blockchain as a new technology. However, as much of the hype cycle momentum dies down in 2021, the true nature of cryptocurrencies may just be beginning to reveal itself: the experience of participating in the blockchain is itself the product.

Blockchain is like a blank canvas that breaks all our preconceived notions about entertainment, finance, and computing systems. Cryptocurrency blurs all traditional experience boundaries and provides an experience that is somewhere in between these three realms.

This also explains why any single property of blockchain, when isolated, has either always struggled to gain adoption or generally led to a worse system.

Games will improve over time by using blockchain as a database; financial systems have no native consumer protections; and computers are expensive to use and difficult to build. While each area has its own tradeoffs, blockchain offers the opportunity to build deeply immersive online experiences that have never been possible before.

Blockchain is naturally a game

People often joke that participating in cryptocurrencies is like participating in a game, and there is truth to this statement. Although Ethereum was not originally designed as a game, people naturally view it as a toy and a canvas to achieve their own goals.

We can think of game points as ETH, and everyone intuitively recognizes that this is valuable ownership of Ethereum. Everyone plays the game differently, similar to different categories of MMORPGs, and the fun is to do things your own way and choose your own destiny. Some people care about creating positive externalities for the world, some want to do it in a creative way, and some want to do it in an entrepreneurial way. Of course, some people only play the game by randomly clicking buttons (airdrop farmers). While everyone chooses their own way of participating, they are all connected through a shared world.

The physical limiting factor of Ethereum is the EVM, which requires ETH as Gas to write to the shared block space. ETH acts as a shared canvas that anyone can write, use, and read without restriction. Ethereums economic model is designed to ensure the physical security and continued operation of the world: ETH faucets are staking rewards in exchange for economic security, and sinks are Gas used to write to the shared block space.

The goal of all players is to accumulate ETH within the constraints of the digital physics and other system properties of the EVM, and the world of Ethereum is organically instantiated through collective meaning, which generates fun and drama.

The next great world is coming

Today, Ethereum is a game that is running out of content. We can see a similar dynamic with Solana. While Solana has successfully created a differentiated culture, the two application ecosystems are derivatives of each other.

This pattern is likely to continue as long as blockchains are not designed with consideration for the fundamental physics of the world and the economic incentives of how we participate in it.

By looking at blockchain as a new content medium alongside existing games, two white space areas are ripe for innovation:

• Democratizing participation

• Creating immersion

Democratizing participation

Rather than just relying on the core constraints of the EVM as the core state machine through which participants interact with each other, we can centralize their interactions onto a more subjective and participatory set of physical entities that contain elements of skill and luck.

These physical collections act as extensions of the EVM’s human-friendly operational state machine and have proven to be powerful canvases for user-generated content.

These physical rules can be implemented as smart contracts similar to games: the geographic location of players and resources, resource economy, resource generation and disappearance, user write-in world mechanics, combat mechanics, etc. While these have traditionally been released as on-chain games and standalone products, here we can think of them as the physical laws of the broader experience, that is, the entire blockchain. These physical laws can also be understood as client-independent game mechanics that exist on the blockchain and can be modified without restrictions, unlike the EVM.

Another way to implement the laws of physics is to modify the underlying architecture of the blockchain. For example, changing the absolute ownership model of the blockchain to allow other users to steal assets from other peoples wallets without permission, or limiting block space production time to weekends.

The economic model of blockchain does not provide economic security for the blockchain, but rather incentivizes participation by defining the physical laws of the world. The players involved provide something more critical: social recognition and user-generated content.

Creating immersion

Cryptocurrency is like games that are sold separately. Rather than selling them separately, all of the above come together into one unified experience, the world itself. This allows us to tell stories about a whole new fantasy world that is fun, weird, and chaotic without fear.

By building a narrative and magic circle in the world, we can suspend reality and allow people to role-play and immerse themselves in it. Unlike typical narratives such as mass adoption, we unlock creative freedom and we can spread the existence of this world in a pure legend.

Beyond lore, we have the opportunity to redesign the entire user journey that participants take to engage with blockchain, from the wallet experience to transactions and block explorers.

This way, you can craft different device narratives to influence and evolve each interface’s relationship with the user. An example would be to view the cross-chain experience of blockchain as an experience in itself: a portal to a new world.

Only by creating an immersive, differentiated world can you create a world that people feel compelled to build, to create content, and to participate.

We can give people roles to play and goals to achieve.

The future is full of fun

Ethereum is an innovation in world creation, not just technology. We have exhausted the content for this game and need to find the next great immersive world. They will be interesting, fun, and weird. That is the world people want, and maybe you will be the one to build it.