1kx: Ethereum, a surreal online world

Author: Peter 'pet3rpan', 1kx

Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News

Everyone is complaining that cryptocurrencies have not produced any real utility. But what I want to say is that it has built an interesting surreal online world.

Blockchain as a New Medium for Entertainment

The immense potential of blockchain in the entertainment sector has yet to be tapped. It is a cultural phenomenon that has unfolded naturally.

Ethereum is loved not for its technology, but for the community that has formed around it, the culture that has emerged, the sense of purpose it gives people, the friends made in the process, the opportunities to serve others, and the ability to attract an audience; not to mention it is filled with endless drama, gossip, chaos, and fun. Some people want to achieve financial abundance quickly, some want to change the world, and many fall somewhere in between, but everyone values the currency that represents ownership of this world: ETH.

Ethereum provides people with an immersive, social, and meaningful game.

Although today's Ethereum has evolved into a universal infrastructure for cryptocurrency use cases (such as payments, trading, and collectibles), its greatest success is not as a backend for applications, but as a complete world where people live, create, belong, and nurture.

The experience of Ethereum is hard to define; it is both strange and novel. We have yet to give a serious name to the experiences that belong to it. In trying to understand it, we may have over-rationalized it, thinking of it as a temporary state of cryptocurrency. This is a time of chaos, oddity, and exploration, an attempt at collective understanding of blockchain as a new technology. However, as much of the hype cycle of 2021 has faded, the true essence of cryptocurrency may just be beginning to reveal itself: the experience of participating in blockchain is the product itself.

Blockchain is like a blank canvas that breaks all our preconceived notions of entertainment, finance, and computing systems. Cryptocurrencies blur all traditional boundaries of experience, providing experiences that lie between these three domains.

This also explains why any single attribute of blockchain, when isolated, has either been difficult to adopt or has often led to worse systems.

Games may gradually improve by using blockchain as a database; financial systems lack native consumer protections; computing is costly and difficult to build. While each domain has its own trade-offs, blockchain offers the opportunity to build unprecedentedly deep immersive online experiences.

Blockchain is Naturally a Game

People often joke that participating in cryptocurrency is like being part of a game, and this is not wrong. Although Ethereum was not initially designed as a game, people naturally see it as a toy and a canvas for achieving their goals.

We can think of game points as ETH, which everyone intuitively recognizes as valuable ownership of Ethereum. Everyone plays the game differently, similar to the various categories in MMORPGs, and the fun lies in doing things in one's own way and choosing one's own destiny. Some care about creating positive externalities for the world, some wish to do so creatively, and some want to do it entrepreneurially. Of course, some people just play the game by randomly clicking buttons (airdrop farmers). While everyone chooses their own way to participate, they are all connected through a shared world.

The physical limiting factor of Ethereum is the EVM, which requires ETH as Gas to write into the shared block space. ETH acts as a shared canvas that anyone can write to, use, and read without restriction. Ethereum's economic model is designed to ensure the physical security and continuous operation of the world: ETH faucets are staking rewards exchanged for economic security, while sinks are the Gas used to write into shared block space.

All players aim to accumulate ETH under the constraints of the digital physics of the EVM and other system properties, organically instantiating the world of Ethereum through collective meaning, thus generating fun and drama.

The Next Great World on the Horizon

Today, Ethereum feels like a game that has run out of content. We can see a similar situation on Solana. While Solana has successfully created a differentiated culture, these two application ecosystems are still derivatives of each other.

As long as the design of blockchain does not take into account the fundamental physical principles of the world and the economic incentives for how we participate in it, this pattern may continue.

By viewing blockchain as a new medium for content and existing games, two blank fields have the conditions for innovation:

• Democratized Participation

• Creating Immersion

Democratized Participation

We can not only rely on the core constraints of the EVM as the core state machine for participants to interact with each other, but also focus their interactions on a set of more subjective and participatory physical collections that include elements of skill and luck.

These physical collections serve as an extension of the EVM's humanized operational state machine, which has proven to be a powerful canvas for user-generated content.

These physical rules can be realized as game-like smart contracts: the geographical locations of players and resources, resource economies, resource generation and disappearance, user mechanisms for writing into the world, combat mechanisms, etc. While these have traditionally been released as on-chain games and standalone products, here, we can view them as the physical laws of a broader experience, namely the entire blockchain. These "physical laws" can also be understood as game mechanics that exist on the blockchain and are client-independent, and can be modified without restriction, unlike the EVM.

Another way to implement physical laws is to modify the underlying architecture of the blockchain. For example, changing the absolute ownership model of the blockchain to allow other users to steal assets from others' wallets without permission, or limiting the production time of block space to weekends.

The economic model of blockchain does not provide economic security for the blockchain, but rather incentivizes participation by defining the physical laws of the world. The players involved provide something even more crucial: social recognition and user-generated content.

Creating Immersion

Cryptocurrency is like a game that is "sold separately." Instead of marketing it separately, we can combine all of the above into a unified experience, which is the world itself. This way, we can tell a story of a brand new fantasy world filled with fun, oddity, and chaos without hesitation.

By constructing a narrative and magic circle in the world, we can pause reality, allowing people to role-play and immerse themselves. Unlike typical narratives around mass adoption, we unleash creative freedom, enabling us to spread the existence of this world in a purely legendary manner.

Beyond the legends, we have the opportunity to redesign the entire user journey for participants interacting with the blockchain, from wallet experiences to transactions and block explorers.

This way, you can create different narrative devices to influence and develop each interface's relationship with users. One example is to view the cross-chain experience of the blockchain itself as an experience: a gateway to new worlds.

Only by creating an immersive and differentiated world can you create a world that makes people feel the need to build, create content, and participate.

We can give people the roles they are to play and the goals they are to achieve.

A Future Full of Fun

Ethereum is about innovation in world creation, not just technological innovation. We have exhausted the content of this game and need to seek the next great immersive world. They will be fun, enjoyable, and quite strange. That is the world people hope for, and perhaps you will be the one to build it.