AR Metaverse Legitimacy

About a month ago, Vitalik Buterin released a blog post called The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy. 

I tweeted about the alignment with the Geo Web approach at the time. But, Vitalik makes the arguments about the importance and power of legitimacy better than I can, so I highly recommend that you go (re)read the blog now and think of it in context of our AR metaverse.

“Legitimacy is a pattern of higher-order acceptance. An outcome in some social context is legitimate if the people in that social context broadly accept and play their part in enacting that outcome, and each individual person does so because they expect everyone else to do the same.” -Vitalik Buterin

In the month since that article, I’ve been using legitimacy as a key word to describe what makes the Geo Web vision different. 

It’s the justification that I give for why I think that we can actually bootstrap a global property rights system that includes “taxes.” No one is exactly clamoring to pay taxes, but the alternative for an AR metaverse is that early adopters simply squat on all the valuable land. 

People seem to agree that a system which results in the land under YOUR home/business being snatched up and effectively held ransom before you know it lacks fairness-based legitimacy. 

Interestingly, saying that we aim for the Geo Web to be fair rather than legitimate has previously resulted in pushback. Legitimacy seems to capture the intuitive meaning that we want without the connotation of “fairness by someone else’s definition.”

As Vitalik notes, there are other ways to create legitimacy (e.g. brute force and greed). But, we feel good about our foundation. Using our network fee to fund public goods can provide another layer of legitimacy and create the healthier, more innovative ecosystem that Vitalik and we all desire.

On to the updates…

Technical

• We released the first wave of the Geo Web Docs site. We’ll roll out additional topics every few days as they’re ready. If you’re new to the Geo Web or curious to dive in deep, this site should be a big improvement over what we’ve previously had available. We’ll supplement this writing with more graphics and videos as well.
• We’ve pushed several more updates to the Geo Web spatial browser. Work on the augmented reality/3D media gallery view is now under way!

Community

• We set a weekly SourceCred distribution schedule for the rest of Q2 and completed retroactive distribution to reward the work done since our first distribution. You can see the Cred and Grain balances on our dashboard. By participating in conversation in Discord or completing work on Github, you’ll automatically receive Cred. To receive Grain (monetary value equivalent to 1 DAI/xDAI), you need to opt-in since each distribution is taxable. Reach out to Graven on Discord if you’re ready to start earning crypto for engaging with the project!
• There was a fun Twitter thread about mechanism design and the overlap with game design. The ideas from @tzhen’s links to game balance and Game Developers Conference (GDC) are really intriguing!

On Deck

• More docs and educational videos
• AR/3D spatial browsing