Second Life is a multiplayer virtual world that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and then interact with other users and user-created content within a multi-user online environment. Developed for personal computers and owned by the San Francisco-based firm Linden Lab, it launched on June 23, 2003 and saw rapid growth for some years; in 2013 it had approximately one million regular users. Growth eventually stabilized, and by the end of 2017, the active user count had fallen to "between 800,000 and 900,000". In many ways, Second Life is similar to massively multiplayer online role-playing video games; nevertheless, Linden Lab is emphatic that their creation is not a game: "There is no manufactured conflict, no set objective." The virtual world can be accessed freely via Linden Lab's own client software or via alternative third-party viewers. Second Life users, also called 'residents', create virtual representations of themselves, called avatars, and are able to interact with places, objects and other avatars. They can explore the world (known as the grid), meet other residents, socialize, participate in both individual and group activities, build, create, shop, and trade virtual property and services with one another. The platform principally features 3D-based user-generated content. Second Life also has its own virtual currency, the Linden Dollar (L$), which is exchangeable with real world currency. Second Life is intended for people ages 16 and over, with the exception of 13–15-year-old users, who are restricted to the Second Life region of a sponsoring institution (e.g., a school).

Balaji on Tribalism, Cloud Cartography, Internet Values [New Content]

Building ecovillage of storm-proof homes made of bone-like biomaterial

Start with the observation that companies, cities, currencies, communities, and countries are all becoming networks. As an analogy, we used to think of books, music, and movies as distinct. Then they all became represented by packets sent over the internet. Yes, we listened to music in audio players and viewed books in ebook readers, but their fundamental structure became digital. Similarly, today we think of stocks, bonds, gold, loans, and art as different. But all of them are represented as debits and credits on blockchains. Again, the fundamental structure became digital. Now, we are starting to think of different kinds of collections of people –— whether communities, cities, companies, or countries —– all fundamentally as networks, where the digital profiles and how they interact become more and more fundamental.

SF city government > Bay Area tech founders. Despite how competent the tech founders of SF were on the Network, the political billionaires of the San Francisco city government managed to use their control of the State to turn the city into a hellhole. Intentionally or not, this had the effect of driving out the new money, their potential competition. Yes, there have been some successful tech-funded recall efforts recently, but it’s likely too little, too late. It’s akin to a stock price showing a bit of an upward trend after a huge and irreversible drop. Because the Bay Area’s monopoly is over. Technology has now globally decentralized into web3, and San Francisco (and even Silicon Valley) has now lost its position as the undisputed tech capital of the world. You no longer need to go to the Bay Area to build a startup — you can found and fund from anywhere. This is, on balance, a good thing — the fact that tech is no longer highly dependent on the triple dysfunction of SF/CA/USA is crucial to the world’s future. Note also that while the defeat of tech in SF was due to State > Network, the reason tech lives to fight another day is thanks to remote work, which allowed movement away from SF in a “Techxit.” And remote work is a case of Network > State.

So, let’s suppose that this limited level of proof was worth it to you. You are willing to pay such that future generations can see an indelible record of a bit of history. How would you get that proof onto the Bitcoin blockchain? The way you’d do this is by organizing your arbitrarily large external dataset (a photo, or something much larger than that) into a Merkle tree, calculating a string of fixed length called a Merkle root, and then writing that to the Bitcoin blockchain through OP_RETURN. This furnishes a tool for proof-of-existence for any digital file. You can do this as a one-off for a single piece of data, or as a periodic backup for any non-Bitcoin chain. So you could, in theory, put a digital summary of many gigabytes of data from another chain on the Bitcoin blockchain every ten minutes for the price of a single BTC transaction, thereby proving it existed

Grievance studies affair

SFBW19 - The Pseudonymous Economy - Balaji Srinivasan