George and I had a virtual blast recently on our podcast with David Birch. As an adviser and global raconteur in payments, identity and digital transformation, Dave needs little introduction. With Meeco COO Victoria Richardson, he has just co-authored a fascinating book, Money in the Metaverse: Digital assets, online identities, spatial computing and why virtual worlds mean real business.

Dave took us into their thinking about secure, private transactions in the metaverse(s).

Virtual money makes the virtual world go around

Dave was drawn to write a new book after finding it strangely clunky to pay for things in at least one virtual world.

He told us about being at an industry event with lots of people “walking around as avatars and meeting each other”. That all seemed real enough until he wanted to buy something. He had to come out of the metaverse and undergo an all-too-real payment rigmarole—scanning a QR code, then another website, typing in card details—before he could rejoin the virtual fun.

Surely, he thought, “I should be doing things inside the metaverse instead of taking off my VR glasses!”. He enlisted Victoria as co-author, who he describes as a “brilliant digital strategist” with a proper framework for thinking about these things.

The state of the art in self-contained metaverse commerce is all about DeFi, Web 3, tokenisation and cryptocurrency.  Loudly sceptical about these things IRL, Dave says “there’s absolutely no doubt” they will form “the next generation financial market infrastructure”.

Dave has an optimistic and generous view of the metaverse. “It’s early days” (of course) yet he is confident that the metaverse’s many pioneers will continue to refine and innovate and surprise us, taking AR/VR technology in new directions.

He likens Apple’s Vision Pro headset to the Apple Newton of the late 1990s. It wasn’t attractive to typical consumers either, but over time, everyone saw that the Newton was the prototype iPad.  So who’s to say where the Vision Pro will lead?

And I should add that Dave does not think $3,000 for a Vision Pro is unreasonable.

In this blog, I’m going to go deep once more on authenticity in the metaverse (I’ve previously looked at how the metaverse should force a rigorous re-examination of digital identity).

But first, here’s a sample of the areas George and I covered with Dave (don’t forget to take a listen):

• In less than 45 minutes, we traversed gaming, brand marketing, car insurance, banking, newspapers and print media, comedy, concert tickets, adult services, COVID, teenage mental health, and virtual girlfriends and boyfriends.
• Digital says Dave is “the natural UX for young people today. It’s how they meet their friends, how they socialize, how they connect. So, in a very short time, brands are going to need to be in those spaces as well.”
• On ownership and tokenisation: “[The] amount of effort that’s already going into the proto-metaverses is substantial, but it’s hamstrung by the fact that the things that they build aren’t theirs. They belong to the platform.”
• On economics, in-built platform security is such an imperative that Dave and Victoria see virtual worlds as potentially safer and more efficient than the real world. As a result, transaction costs will fall, and businesses in all sectors will feel pressure to move into the metaverse.

Real authenticity

When we turned to authenticity, Dave set the scene as follows:

“Of course, in the metaverse nothing’s real, putting to one side what real means … we certainly don’t want the metaverse to end up in the mess that we’re in at the moment with the internet where we see fake [TV personalities] shilling cryptocurrency”.

Cryptographic security must be “part of the warp and weft” of a new infrastructure, in a way that we simply overlooked in the rush to Web 1 and Web 2.  Dave points out that a whole “panoply of keys, key generation, certificates, digital signatures and encryption” was missing from the internet.  He is a forceful champion of security being inherent to the infrastructure; on this point he calls himself a “maximalist”.

What would such security look like? Well, we might not even notice it. Crucially, Dave does not imagine us having to prove our bona fides by showing pictures of virtual driver licences. I agree; it would be moronic to simulate a superficial verification process when it is so bad in real life.

Instead, Dave foresees metaverse platforms just knowing your authorisation attributes and applying them to covertly regulate your virtual experience. So, if for example you’re not 18 years old and you approach an age-restricted venue or event, then you won’t even have the option of going in.

“In any metaverse I’d want to take part in, if a photo doesn’t have a digital signature that says ‘this comes from the New York Times’ or ‘from George Peabody’, I don’t want to even see it.”

So, one crucial distinction he sees between the metaverse and any virtual world built so far on the internet, is that authenticity will be part of the infrastructure.

In a sense, everything in a Dave Birch metaverse will be real!

Questions

A simulated world in which everything we see is true could save digital civilisation. But we need to approach any Utopia with caution.

What’s real in an unreal world? What is truth? If the answer is everything’s relative, then authenticity will need to be configurable.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and authenticity in the metaverse needs to be in the hands of the beholder as well.

The point of the metaverse is to shift reality. If users have any freedom to adjust what’s real, then they will need to set their own authenticity standards. I might for example be able to have the BBC determine what political stories are true as far as I am concerned and have New Yorker film critics control my cinema experience.

Inevitably, beneath any metaverse, are the unseen platforms. As we discussed with Dave, platforms have had most of the control so far. Dave calls for a shift in control and asset ownership from landlords to denizens.

There are many privacy issues. If a metaverse platform knows my personal attributes and applies them to shape my virtual experience (such as removing pubs and clubs from my experience if I am under-age) then the platform must be watching what I am trying to do around the clock.

I guess that’s a price users could pay for the seamlessness of having the world “know” them without having to see a virtual ID card. That trade-off might be perfectly fine—if we trust the platforms, and/or they closely regulated.

If metaverses even come close to mimicking the richness of the real world, the platforms will have unprecedented executive control over our activity. They will literally direct what we experience and even how we behave, because the platforms’ software will mediate our very existence in the worlds.

Is the metaverse going to need benign meta-dictators?

More on Money in the Metaverse

Reviewed by Irish Tech News, May 2, 2024.

Dave was interviewed on the Pay it Forward podcast, June 28, 2024.

Victoria and Dave were interviewed on The Banker, July 10, 2024.