Permissionless Composability - Monday Links - 2022-05-09

Read this first

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• 7 Essential Ingredients of a Metaverse: The best encapsulation of the metaverse/Web3 vision I’ve seen yet. If you want to see what the true believers see (and are chasing with billions in VC dollars), this is basically it. My take is that this all hinges on the idea of permissionless interoperability, which she explores in the Composability point. To use one of the common examples about in-game digital goods: It would be wonderful to take a Marvel skin I bought in Fortnite into another game. How does that work? It’s not just about the technical realities of the 3D model and assets. How does Disney get paid for that usage? Or should they get paid? Lots of interesting questions. The closest analogue I keep coming back to is Movies Anywhere. Buy a movie once on any of the major services and it unlocks, for free, on all of the other participating services. How does one make that work “permissionlessly” with NFTs?
• The Ownership Economy 2022: Lots to digest in this newsletter, but a couple of key takeaways for me. First, this is a compelling vision, and fits well with the link above. What’s not to like about turning your data and your digital spending into real assets, not just crappy in-app-purchases and disappear the moment the company pivots or dies? At the same time, this is a story for people with means and disposable income to spare and then some. It’s a story for wealthy folks right now. That makes me uncomfortable - how can you change the world without improving the lives of everyday folks? But then I look back at cell phones or even the Internet - they started out at toys for wealthier folks. How many movies in the 80s tied cell phones to rich folks. “Money never sleeps” and all that. Second, if you’re looking to get into this space and make a meaningful contribution, it seems like the thought experiment to start with is this: what has to get solved between today’s nascent Web3 world and a future where NFTs (or an equivalent) make sense for low dollar digital purchases like skins and in-game assets - not just the transaction fees, but the interoperability that makes these digital assets actually function as decentralized assets? That’s the roadmap to a future where this vision actually could happen.

Reads

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• Apple, Google, and Microsoft commit to expanded support for FIDO standard to accelerate availability of passwordless sign‑ins: This is good news. Adoption is easier if this is universal. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at Yubikeys and have been frustrated every time I’ve tried them. It’s just a little too hacky because of inconsistent support. Would love to see this become real. Passwords are dumb. We need to get rid of them.
• Wtch This: Unravelling the Mystery Behind a Secret YouTube URL: Sometimes a simple feature ends up having weird side effects, at least when it comes to user expectations. Interesting little story here.
• What Elon Musk Can Learn From Mastodon—and What He Can’t: A lot of what Musk has proposed has been tried before. This is a good look at the things that can and can’t be learned from this prior work.

Code & Tools

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• Stych: I’ve been looking into authentication SAAS providers. There are the usual suspects, Auth0, Okta, etc. Their emphasis on passwordless auth as their key value proposition is interesting. Appreciate any feedback if you’ve used them or anything like this.