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In what could be seen as historic step toward the legitimization of the metaverse, the island nation of Barbados is preparing to legally declare digital real estate sovereign land with the establishment of a metaverse embassy.

From Barbados to Become First Sovereign Nation With an Embassy in the Metaverse:

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The Maldives on Tuesday became the first country to open an embassy in the virtual reality of web-based Second Life, a fantasy world inhabited by computer-generated residents, the Maldives mission to the United Nations in Geneva said.

From Maldives opens first virtual embassy on Second Life:

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The cost to businesses of processing card payments in the UK is greater than it should be, and it is too difficult for those businesses to switch between intermediaries that link them into card payment systems, a UK regulator has found following an extensive review.

From UK regulator raises concerns over cost of processing card payments:

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation is acknowledging that hackers compromised its email servers and sent spam messages. B

From Hackers sent spam emails from FBI accounts, agency confirms : NPR:

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Crucially, Mastercard is deploying Open Banking technology through Finicity in the US and its pending acquisition of Aiia in Europe to use consumer permissioned data tied to debit or bank account credentials to run affordability checks on applicants.

From Mastercard BNPL programme gains momentum:

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If the results of this ‘development’ phase conclude that the case for CBDC is made, and that it is operationally and technologically robust, then the earliest date for launch of a UK CBDC would be in the second half of the decade.

From Statement on Central Bank Digital Currency next steps | Bank of England:

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That’s the premise under which Jeremy Balkin, global head of innovation and corporate development at J.P. Morgan Payments, operates. It means that any merchant is reliant on the ability to send and receive money quickly and safely, a concept that Balkin says is at the root of such innovations as cars becoming payment vehicles.

From JPMorgan executive on how payments are ‘eating the world’ | American Banker:

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Markets can’t operate without clear property rights: Before someone can buy a good, it has to be clear who has the right to sell it, and once someone does buy, you need to be able to transfer ownership from the seller to the buyer. NFTs solve this problem by giving parties something they can agree represents ownership.

From How NFTs Create Value:

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Axie Infinity is “a Pokémon-inspired universe where anyone can earn tokens through skilled gameplay and contributions to the ecosystem. Players can battle, collect, raise, and build a land-based kingdom for their pets.” The game in its present state is centered on the buying and trading of non-scarce virtual creatures called “Axies” in order to battle them against each other, but future plans put a heavy focus on buying and selling scarce digital land.

From Land speculators will kill your game’s growth:

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I can tell you exactly what’s going to happen here, because it’s what always happens – speculators will buy up all the land and hold it. If there’s no cost to holding onto this scarce asset that everybody needs and wants, and this asset will predictably rise in value, speculators will just sit on it and watch the price shoot through the roof and anyone who wants to use land will have to pay out the nose.

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Ultima Online (UO) first launched in 1997. Though hardly the first MMO, it was a genre-defining title. It notably featured a housing system: save up enough resources for a blueprint of the house you want – anything from a small shack to a magnificent castle – then find a free plot of land somewhere, and place it down. It didn’t take long for nearly every free space to get used up.

If you didn’t visit your house often enough it would be automatically deleted to make room for others, but enterprising land speculators were undeterred. Holding free plots with a building – any building – was a good investment because the price players were willing to pay to gain access to the land far exceeded the costs of capturing and holding it.

So why didn’t players just move to a less populated server, one that wasn’t already filled up with houses? It’s a good question – the less popular servers had more free space; but they also had far less players, which made the experience less fun. Besides, back then you couldn’t transfer your character across servers, so moving also meant abandoning not only all of your friends, but also all of your experience, skills, and equipment. Populated land was and is the most valuable land.

From Land speculators will kill your game’s growth:

Location, location, location

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An average person defecates about 500g a day, which can be converted to 50 litres of methane gas, the environmental engineer said. This gas can generate 0.5kWh of electricity or be used to drive a car for about 1.2km (0.75 miles).

From South Korean toilet turns excrement into power and digital currency | Reuters:

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