Hi there. I’m Scott, and I’ve been working on a kind of metaverse (”proto metaverse”). Since I’ve been working basically in stealth mode for the last… 15 months, I’m writing this post to start talking about it, what is it, what are my expectations from it, what is it’s background and how I understand it.
Origin
Does anyone remember the Million Dollar Homepage ?
It was a site that came roughly out of nowhere with a new concept, selling pixels on a webpage. It was something of a viral sensation for it’s time and it made the author a decent chunk of money.
Being someone who is interested in weird stuff like that, at some point it inspired me to ask the question: why did it have to just come to an end? In part, the answer is obvious: it didn’t have any way to evolve beyond that, once it was full it was full, reallocating space was never within scope. But, wasn’t there any value in the idea of creating a 2d market for space on a webpage? Was it just a flash in the pan?
I remained curious about the idea, so the next question is what kind of dynamics would you want to allocate the space then, so it didn’t just come to an end?
I then had quite a few failed attempts using Chipmunk2d physics engine to try to create a financialized layout algorithm… Before eventually deciding that wasnt going to work and committing to building the app as an EVM smart contract, and doing the whole layout stuff socially / using markets.
Enter…
The Beastie Board
So, once I committed to smart contracts and left the layout engine stuff behind, it started to fall into place more quickly. It starts with uploading an image to a webpage and creating a Beastie. The starting point is to provide the greatest visibility to the person or entity willing to pay the most. And rather than buying and selling pixels, I took the direction of having a dynamic set of rules, rather like a game, that allow for beasties to actually grow and shrink according to different circumstances. This produced a little bit of complexity, as I added rules to try to incentivize different outcomes, and the collection of those rules is called the “Beastienomics”. The technical nitty gritty is for another day, today is for broad strokes.
Locality
Another thing that I tried to solve was something that I thought could be improved upon from the Million Dollar Homepage, and that is the visuals. Granted, the web has changed alot since 2005, but the MDHP has each placement crying out for attention in loud colors; it’s an eyesore, but it’s what you would expect, and you see the same thing with the electronic displays in Times Square and Picadilly Circus. So how to fix this? Well I figured that, if there was a social interest between a placement and it’s neighbors, there might be a shared interest to coordinate to improve that situation. That gave me the idea to allow creating connections between cells, which are given some economic (and thus security) significance that gets less efficient as the link gets longer, making location an important factor in placement. Now, I don’t know if this will solve the visuals even slightly, but giving this kind of significance to location hints at something which could be a big win: discoverability.
Why is this cool? Well, using the MDHP as an example again; it has roughly 3000 plots; though it might seem like you can glance at a fair number of them if you visit the page, you probably actually can’t, or you’d guess that the number of plots was much lower than it really is (well, I did). Making locality important should have the effect of getting everyone that makes a placement to consider 2 things: where will I be safe, and where do I want to take advantage of existing eyeball-traffic? Which mimics the real world (”location, location, location…”). Now, if a new and efficient mechanism for content discovery could fall out of a 2d market, wouldn’t that be something?
Social networking
So as I mentioned, cells can connect to each other, a bit like a social network. But this needs some qualification. Unlike a social network, where you send a request and a mutual connection is established, in Beastie the connections are one way. This is because the connections have balances assigned to them, and it wouldn’t really make sense for cells to assign each other a balance. They can do, but it’s not really the point. The connections are to do with allocation of resources and security, so a bidirectional link isn’t really required.
So can you actually call it a social network, if there isn’t really any focus on communication (at least between the members of the network)? Well I think so, kinda. The platform doesn’t (yet?) explicitly enable communication, but it’s nonetheless in the interest of the owners of the beasties to communicate in order to negotiate which links they will make. And if that happens, then you have a something kinda sorta like a community.
Security
Ok, I mentioned security. I managed to get this far without mentioning that the Beastie Board is not what you expect in this sense; placing a cell carries a risk that another cell on the board will do some action to you that diminishes or threatens to diminish your visibility. There are built in counterincentives to performing these kinds of adverse actions (opportunity costs), but they are not there to stop them outright, only to make sure they don’t trash the place. But what this does provide is the opportunity for visibility to be more dynamic and flexible. This is in contrast to MDHP, as well as basically all of web3, which is based on assets, tokens, things that cannot be taken away or diminished (though they can and very often do lose value, which in some ways we use as a proxy to territory), and anything that does entail gaining and losing space, like for example the board game “Go”, is, well a game. Or if it’s not a game, then it’s like real world adversarial competition for territory, and we just don’t really that many examples of platforms that enable this, that aren’t games. So where does Beastie lie? Well, it’s not really a game (obligatory); it’s more like a petri dish environment, or just anywhere where civilization hasn’t quite taken root, but with the potential for civilization to take root within, in various different ways. It’s just not a given, so it’s got that aspect of being a somewhat “primitive security environment”.
So, to sum up, the Beastie board is:
Tool for marketing and publicity
Web first “proto metaverse”
Social network for NFTs (and smart contracts, more generally)
Rent
The way that the Beastie board makes money is by charging the cells rent in exchange for the visibility. This is because, as I mentioned before, Beastie has a dynamic layout algorithm and space is not guaranteed, so selling plots of land was kind of out of the question from the start. Also, it’s been done and done again… I suspect that if you want to bootstrap a metaverse, then getting users (or advertisers in this case) to pay rent should be your benchmark of weather or not it’s working. Because, the ability to pay rent means (given a sufficient period of time) that someone is deriving economic value from the thing they are paying for. And, while the word “rent” might not be particularly popular these days, it does nonetheless seem like it might be a necessary evil for any economy based in physical or virtual space, because people who actually work for a living don’t always have the capital on hand / its not convenient to purchase space when they need it.
Conclusion, Launch
So I have kind of just scratched the surface here, and this post was written a few months ago, and it doesn’t go into some important aspects and potential growth directions… Beastie has the potential to be a real town square for social media, as well as being a good platform for new kinds of apps (“micro apps”), and integration with other existing networks is key to it’s success.
Launch is coming ASAP. in the meantime, if you’d like to get an early preview or chat about something, get in touch via Twitter, would love to hear from you.