The Metaverse - Neal Stephenson to Lamina1

In 1992 Snow Crash was published, the third book by the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson. Stephenson created a three-dimensional digital space, a sort of a virtual world that closely connected to society, he called that virtual world: The Metaverse.

That was not the imaginary internet as it used to be. It was paralleled to the real world, where people who are geographically isolated can communicate, interact and to live real experiences.

The book has become one of the most popular sci-fi books of all time and together with William Gibson's book Neuromancer they stand the foundation texts of the cyberpunk and decades after he has been called the modern Nostradamus as Google co-founder Sergey Brin said it “anticipated what’s going to happen.”

In the novel, set sometime in the early 21st century, the United States has been ravaged by hyperinflation. Inequality abounds. And a virus is wreaking havoc on society.

The surprise is that three decades later Neil Stephenson's metaverse is about to become reality with the creation of Lamina1. Along with Bitcoin Foundation co-founder Peter Venesses he recently launched Lamina1 to build infrastructure, experience, for users that can also create a world that truly lives on its own and allows these users to experience it and to get economical rewards for those interactions.

Specific details on the project are sparse at this stage but they are working on it.

But it seems that he has the ability to vision the future because in 1999 he published a book called "cryptomicon", it's a book pre-Bitcoin, pre-Satoshi; if we consider that Bitcoin came up in 2008, in this book we could find some clues about the origins of the term "crypto"... a matter that we'll discuss in a next post.