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Philip Rosedale has been thinking deeply about how to architect large-scale, distributed virtual worlds after experiencing many bottlenecks as the founder of Second Life. His new metaverse venture, High Fidelity, is taking a much more distributed approach with how it’s being developed openly in open source using Worklist.net contractors, how it plans on distributing hosting and compute resources to user’s computers, as well as using a decentralized identity based upon blockchain technology. Rather than having a centralized authority for tracking and data mining an individual’s identity, they’re planning on using what’s called “Self-sovereign Identity”, which Christopher Allen explains in great detail in his comprehensive essay titled A Path to Self-Sovereign Identity.

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I had a chance to catch up with Rosedale at the 4th annual Silicon Valley Virtual Reality conference where we talked about distributed identity, privacy in VR, High Fidelity’s business model based upon sales tax, whether existing cryptocurrencies will work for them, yang and yin currencies, and their open source development process. High Fidelity is architecting a lot of the open standards for the future of the metaverse, and Rosedale is one of the most deep and profound thinkers in the social virtual reality space. He’s ahead of his time in architecting virtual worlds that will be able to democratize space and disrupt travel.

May 5th, 2017 also marks the three-year anniversary of the Voices of VR Podcast, and this is a fitting podcast as I started the bulk of my interviews at the very first Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference in 2014 and I’ve been able to talk to Rosedale at each of the last four SVVR gatherings. You can check out my previous interviews with Rosedale in episodes #25, #173, and #376.

Blockchain cryptogeeks are architecting a decentralized future for identity & the metaverse. #RebootingWebOfTrust https://t.co/kI2E3Xuhhy — Kent Bye VoicesOfVR (@kentbye) May 5, 2017

Full proceedings from the 4th #RebootingWebOfTrust DesignShop gathering to decentralize identity w the blockchain:https://t.co/KGMdoqqLRg — Kent Bye VoicesOfVR (@kentbye) May 5, 2017

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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip