Hello, and welcome to another post in our Metaverse series! If you missed the ones we’ve already done, be sure you skip back and take a gander. There’s some interesting stuff in there. Today, we’ll be discussing potential pitfalls in the Metaverse—things you’ll want to watch out for as you step into the virtual world being built on the blockchain. Ready? Grab a warm drink and a snack, and let’s dive right in.
This week, there was an op-ed released by China that highlighted a number of issues people are already facing in the Metaverse: illegal fund raising, fraud, and virtual real estate speculation. If you’d like to take a peek at that article, see it here: https://www.rt.com/business/549872-china-highlights-metaverse-risks/ and on January 31, 2022, there was another article detailing a physical attack on a woman’s avatar: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/01/31/woman-allegedly-groped-metaverse/9278578002/
Those are a few of the things we’ll be discussing as we move along here, so you may want to take a quick gander at those articles.
Sexual harassment (I mean, really?) is only one of the items that will need to be put on the watch list for potential pitfalls in the Metaverse.
Here are a number of others:
Thieves – These people are the ones who find ways to take what’s yours with tactics other than hacking. They’ll potentially know how to get into your blockchain and “steal” your personal items.
Hackers – These are serious people to worry about. There are well-known public figures who’ve had their entire Facebook accounts taken over, and nothing can be done about it. They’ll be able to steal your whole identity and everything attached to it.
Fraudsters – These are the ones who tell you if you do X, they’ll do Z, but they don’t have Z to begin with and can’t do it, so you do X, and then these folks take off with whatever X might be (money, tokens, credits, etc.).
Imposters – These are the people pretending to be other people—oftentimes, famous ones. We already see this on social media, so it stands to reason that it’ll translate to the Metaverse.
Catfishers – These are the folks who hit you up on social media that pretend to be someone they’re not to lull you into a “relationship” in order to take advantage of you in some way.
As you know, the Metaverse will include access to things like NFTs that you own on the blockchain. You’ll also need to watch out for fake NFTs. Always purchase your NFTs from reliable sources.
These potential pitfalls in the Metaverse shouldn’t scare you off exploring it. You’ll find a lot of things there that you simply won’t have access to any other way. Even JP Morgan has opened a lounge in the Metaverse called Onyx by JP Morgan. It’s in Decentraland. More information can be found in this article: https://news.bitcoin.com/jpmorgan-opens-lounge-in-metaverse-1-trillion-market-infiltrate-every-sector/
As long as you’re aware of what you might run into and take steps to protect yourself (and your virtual world holdings), you should be just fine. There will be a lot of security risks, and there will be a lot of opportunities to procure software or hardware to protect yourself from those risks. Keep your eyes open, and enjoy!
We hope you’re loving our Metaverse series, and we hope you check out some of the other posts we’ve done. We still plan to dive into school, work, real estate, and even NFTs. Be sure you’re following our blog or following us on one of our social media platforms, where we’ll share all the posts we publish here at CloudQ.
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