Metaverse and the Law

PROGRAM

1991 – Birth of the Internet
On the 6th of August 1991, Tim Berners-Lee posted the very first public invitation for collaboration on the WorldWideWeb. This is the date the Internet was born.

1992 – Snow Crash
The very next year, science fiction writer Neal Stephenson coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, where humans, as avatars, interact with each other and software agents, in a three-dimensional virtual space that uses the metaphor of the real world.

1993 – Proof of Work
The term and concept were introduced in the context of computer security as a way to prevent email spamming. Later, proof work became one of the primary techniques for verifying and legitimizing transactions on a blockchain, specifically – cyber currency mining based on computer power.

2003 – Second Life
Second Life is the online virtual world, developed by Philip Rosedale and his team at Linden Lab in 2003. It was very much a precursor to the Metaverse worlds being developed today.

2009 – Bitcoin & Blockchain
On the 3rd of January in 2009, the bitcoin network came into existence with its mysterious founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, mining the genesis block of bitcoin (block number 0), which yielded a reward of 50 bitcoins. This was the day Bitcoin was born.

Along with the invention of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto also invented blockchain to serve as the public transaction ledger for Bitcoin.

2012 – NFTs
An NFT or “Nifty” is a Non-Fungible Token, representing a unique item instead of fungible tokens, which are mutually interchangeable, such as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. The concept of NFTs has been with us since December 2012 with the creation of “Colored Coins,” in which additional information is incorporated onto a bitcoin so that it is no longer fungible but unique. This, interestingly enough, was a project spearheaded by a young Vitalik Buterin as he worked on improvements for the Bitcoin blockchain.

2015 – Smart Contracts
Smart contracts were first proposed in the early 1990s by Nick Szabo, who coined the term to refer to “a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises.” Since the 2015 launch of the Ethereum blockchain, the term “smart contract” has been more specifically applied toward the notion of general-purpose computation that takes place on a blockchain or distributed ledger.

2016 – Pokémon GO
Pokémon Go was the first game to overlay a virtual world onto the real world. It uses mobile devices with GPS to locate, capture, train, and battle virtual creatures, called Pokémon, which appear as if they are in the player’s real-world location.

2020 – First Concert in the Metaverse
In April 2020, Travis Scott and Marshmello performed in the video game, Fortnite to just under 30 million people.

2020 – Alien Worlds
This wildly popular dapp was created with a multi-metaverse interplanetary scenario that had NFT characters interacting in a decentralized autonomous organization to mine tokens and perform other tasks. By 2021 Alien Worlds had more than 2.5 million users.

Source: FuturistSpeaker