Communications has evolved. What starts off in the imaginations of outlier thinkers, often finds its ways into the corridors of human history. George Orwell, predicted (or it can be argued, created the manual for) many technological and social movements which are now considered ‘the norm’ in his dystopic novel ‘1984’; from CCTV and being watched by ‘Big Brother’ down to changes in social conventions — the shortening of words with ‘Newspeak’ whose counterpart can be found in the modern equivalent of hieroglyphs, the emoji.

Hollywood, whose role in the evolution of communication has been to convey ‘visually’ the thoughts inscribed in novels and screenplays of these outlier thinkers has influenced the technological advancements made by showing us what ‘the future’ should look like and in turn inspired the efforts of inventors, engineers and tinkerer’s of all sorts to build these visions.

Philip K. Dick’s novel ‘The Minority Report’ sowed the kernels for the Hollywood blockbuster of the same name in which we saw a vision of the future, including the omnipresence of augmented reality adverts served based on user preferences.

Advancements made in artificial intelligence with support vector machine learning’s convergence to convolutional neural networks and Smartphones with the newfound power to turn their screen into a window to augmented reality, and ‘smart glasses’ to follow shortly, have meant these technologies are becoming the new reality.

Then there is what can only be described as, another ‘kettle of fish’, advancements made in ‘Fintech’ (‘Newspeak’ for Financial Technology) which started with the sharing economy or ‘collaborative finance’ and peer to peer lending platforms like Zopa in 2005; and then RateSetter and Funding Circle circa 2010 in the UK, given a boost by the financial crash.

These platforms provided ‘alternative finance’ to traditional lenders, powered by individual ‘lenders’ looking for a good rate of return on their savings and ‘borrowers’ looking for a lower cost to finance than they could find with high street lenders. It was revolutionary; it saw a boom in third party platforms facilitating these arrangements, with the FCA even adding a new regulation for ‘an electronic platform with a view to lending’ to its handbook and creating a ‘regulatory sandbox’ to deal with the surge of fintech start-ups, including other ‘people powered’ solutions like ‘crowdfunding.’

However, one outlier fintech product slipped past the gaze of the central banks, unnoticed. It happened in October 2008 with the publication of a post on an unassuming cryptography mailing list with a link to a white paper entitled: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. It was the post that dealt a fatal wound to the dominance of fiat and heralded the new alternative to what was once merely known as ‘money’ — but has grown to become, cryptocurrency.

2017 was the year that the breath of life really took hold of this behemoth, cryptocurrency; the rise of the smart contract and the Ethereum protocol in particular saw the wide adoption of a new method of fundraising known as the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) resulting in the market cap of cryptocurrency growing from $17bn to $300bn in 10 months and Bitcoin — the currency that had been chalked off as the plaything of cypherpunks and their ilk — becoming the ‘new commodity’ to store value, a digital gold, growing in value from a few cents to $11,000 — each. The idea of the new commodity being, in essence, a string of ones’ and zeroes, caught everyone off-guard. However, in a world that has become increasingly digital, those that had their ear to the ground and saw the writing on the wall post the 2008 crash took early positions in the evolution of money.

They are already looking at the next commodity — virtual space. Augmented reality will herald the next iteration of visual communications with brands and app developers delivering content in real-word locations to create exciting and new ways to interact with physical environments and spaces. We have already seen this through the popularity of apps like Pokémon Go, which whilst highly engaging with audiences, bought with it a number of philosophical questions namely; who owns and is responsible for the virtual space this AR content is delivered to?

Bubbled (www.bubbled.io) is taking steps to deliver a decentralised solution that resolves matters of virtual space ownership, by using the blockchain to provide an immutable proof of ownership that turns virtual space into a digital asset complete with its own cryptocurrency, BBL, to manage purchases and allow content creators to monetise their creations.

Our patent pending technology identifies the unique and global latitude and longitude coordinates that make up our planet and wraps them up in the blockchain, using smart contracts to control ownership rights and attributes.

The Bubbled SDK then allows any app developer to ‘plug’ their own application into this virtual multiverse, aptly dubbed the ‘Bubbleverse’, to start delivering content to multiple users on this global standard, in real-world locations. Owners of virtual land can control rights to display content at these locations and rent out their spaces to brands, individuals and businesses seeking to engage existing or new audiences at high traffic locations; with ownership being proven and cryptographically secured with the same technology used by Bitcoin.

As the future looms ever closer, virtual space will become the new commodity that everybody remembers reading about but took no notice of; that is of course, until the virtual space of Buckingham Palace sells for $100m and we all kick ourselves for not taking note — like we did with Bitcoin.

Bubbled is an AR platform whose framework is solving issues of ownership and governance within real-world spaces hosting augmented reality content. Join our Telegram and follow for updates on our Token Generation Event.

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