The so-called "Metaverse" is such a buzzword nowadays, that a countless number of IT businesses are jumping into its arena for the hope of not lagging behind their competitors during the upcoming technological revolution. And as a result, there are different types of metaverses all floating amidst the thin air of our digital collective consciousness, within the ecosystem of different platforms, hardware infrastructures, and other technical standards.
It is a bit weird to witness that the notion of "Metaverse" is receiving so much spotlight from the public, since there have already been myriads of kindred virtual environments throughout the past couple of decades. Let us think of Minecraft, Roblox, Second Life, countless MMO games, and various experimental 3D social networking platforms of the 90s and early 2000s; they all deserve to be defined as "metaverses" to some extent (aside from a few technical differences such as lack of high-quality AR/VR gears, distributed networking systems, etc). Nevertheless, one cannot deny that the rhetoric surrounding the word "Metaverse" is not just a short-lived fad, but rather a cultural movement which will shape the social atmosphere of our future.
One thing that a metaverse often lacks, though, is a persistent value system. Unlike our real world in which land, petroleum, foods, and other resources are limited in amount, our cyberspace continuum is a virtually infinite horizon upon which any digital resources can easily be replicated.
You have a cool-looking metaverse over there? Oh, I have my own cool-looking metaverse over here. Anybody can create their own metaverse that is filled with infinite amounts of space and energy. And since the internet is a (nearly) free estate in which a server and a database is all we need to be able to give birth to such virtual assets, the only thing that can possibly sustain the monetary value of a particular metaverse is its popularity (e.g. If the MMORPG game you play is popular enough, you might be able to sell your in-game items in exchange for real money, etc).
In order for resources in a metaverse (virtual land, virtual house, virtual money, etc) to be as valuable as our real-world resources, we must create a special kind of metaverse where energy is strictly conserved yet people are forced to play only within this particular space instead of creating their own replicas of it. Well, in our shared digital world in which every piece of data can be reproduced almost for free, how will this be even possible? From my perspective, there seems to be a rather straightforward solution.
Let us imagine that the Federal Reserve of the United States, with the aid of the nation's tech giants such as Microsoft and Apple, somehow decides to create their own central metaverse called "FedVerse". And let us also imagine that they announce to the public that all future U.S. dollars will be distributed from within this virtual space. The IRS (Internal Revenue Service), after waiting for a while for the whole globe to chill and calm down a bit, subsequently declares that all U.S. taxes will have to be paid via FedVerse, which means that all taxpayers will have to create their own avatars inside FedVerse's cosmetic shop, deposit their real-world dollars into the central bank of FedVerse, and make tax payments from there.
This will force everyone, whose economic interests and obligations are directly associated with USD, to reside in FedVerse and process every major financial activity through its protocol. This will effectively bring into existence a special type of metaverse - a metaverse that is irreplicable (due to the presence of a powerful central authority) and is inevitably tied to the core of our global economy (because it is the birthplace of all future USD), and therefore can assure that all of its internal resources are just as valuable as those in our real world.