History of Metaverse - A Journey Through Time - computingnirvana.com

Metaverse was first described by science fiction author Neal Stephson in his book Snow crash which was released in June 1992. Almost an year after August 6, 1991, when without fanfare, British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee published the first-ever website while working at CERN.

Birth of Internet allowed online gaming to take shape in its most primitive form. Major gaming companies like Sega & Atari were rushing to inculcate internet with gaming, which saw the proliferation of role-playing games (RPGs) and If there’s one thing that makes Metaverse easily understandable by a wider audience and gives it authenticity are these RPGs.

The term Proof Of Work (POW) was coined by Markus Jakobsson and Ari Juels in their paper “Proofs of Work and Bread Pudding Protocols” which was released back in 1999. Though the concept was invented by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor in 1993 as a way to deter denial-of-service attacks.

What started as a way to prevent service abuses such as spam on a network, has now become pivotal to the way transactions are legitimized on a Blockchain.

Early 2000s saw rapid growth in internet adoption all over the world, which further bought huge influx of people looking to explore the online world . During that time Philip Rosedale, an entrepreneur from San Diego california, started working on “Second Life” which probably was going to become the closest thing ever created that allowed people to experience virtual world.

Satoshi Nakamoto, is he a person ? or a group of people ? is still a mystery but what is not a mystery is his invention Bitcoin. Bitcoin or the technology it is based upon Blockchain is touted as one of the most important inventions since Internet. In his whitepaper (published in 2008), Satoshi Nakamoto intended to resolve one of the core problems that we face with fiat currency (government-issued currency that is not backed by a commodity such as gold) which is a central authority regaulating the currency, which could lead to corruption.

What started as coloured coin project has now become a mammoth asset class. Yes ! NFTs or Non Fungible (read replaceable/interchangeble) Token were first conceived as colored coins which got issued on Blockchain in 2012-2013. The idea behind these coins was to mimic real world assets like coupons, shares, digital collectibels and digital art. What drives the value for these NFTs is, that now we have a definite way to identify and authenticate a piece of art without relying on foresencics, as each and every transaction is stored on a blockhain.

While Bitcoin was first generation crypto project with fundamental features, Ethreum was gen 2 crypto with more advancements, it not only intended to decentralised banks but also Apps and services there by potentially decentralising internet itself.

DAO or Decentralized Autonomous Organization embraces the idea of Algorithimic Regulation, where rules of a organization are encoded as computer program which is controlled by organziation members and are maintaned on a blockchain, an example of it could be a group of people trying to achieve a goal/own something using shared funds consider a subreddit of HipHopHeads starting their own record label using a shared bank account and each member would then be able to own a part of the record.

When Bitcoin made us reasses our definition of currency it gave us a sneak peak of the world running on DApps. DApps or Decentralized Applications (Apps) is an open source application that operates autonomously on a decentralized blockchain & can only be built on Smart contract networks. All the DApps work on a specific platform which is compatible with its unique code and not on standard web browsers. The first DApp on Ethereum to gain mass user attention was a collectibles game known as CryptoKitties, which literally crashed the Ethereum network at the height of its popularity.

Throughout our journey we discussed about various technologies and how they came into existence. Culmination of all these different technologies, working together to produce a virtual reality world is what we call Metaverse. The last decade ( 2010 -2020 ) has been a huge building block interms of its development, where slowly and steadily different aspects of Metaverse were concieved and we can’t be more existed of what’s next is store for us as we haven’t really scratched the surface and are still oblivious of its true potential.