There is zero question that Covid has invoked havoc on the world as we know it. In addition to the loss of life and loss of business, there have been other less obvious casualties. More specifically in person gatherings.
Yesterday, I was able to take part in one of the few in person gatherings that have finally been starting back up here at the end of 2021. Namely, it was professional group that I am part of. We meet about once every other month and we discuss different topics including education technology and STEM.
Much to my surprise, at topic came up yesterday that I absolutely wasn't expecting from this group of people. The group facilitator brought up the idea of the Metaverse. More specifically, he opened the conversation by talking about the recent Decentraland land sale on the secondary market.
If you hadn't heard, a piece of land sold over there for a couple million dollars.
Being quite familiar with selling digital land, I was more than happy to offer my two cents to the discussion.
Let me go off on a tangent first though. Decentraland drives me a bit crazy. I wrote this promotional piece about it back in 2019 but at the time I didn't have the funds to invest into it. Even then gas fees were relatively high on ETH, so that was a deal breaker for me as well.
Sure enough, this is one that I am kicking myself over now. If I had just found the money to invest, my world could be quite different now. Oh well I guess, I will get the next one!
But I digress.
I can remember several years ago I was talking to this very same group of people and during one of the free shares, I showed them my STEEM account and how I was earning money (though not much at the time) by blogging. The facilitator remembered that and as I said, he was more than happy for me to give my thoughts on the whole metaverse thing.
I tried to explain it as best as I understand it to the attendees. I also tried to explain how important blockchain was going to be to the metaverse as we move forward. Finally, I explained my "big win" I had selling some digital land.
I don't really know how many people my words landed with (at least one, but I will get to that in a bit), but personally, I was really struck by the discussion.
First, I never would have guessed I might have another opportunity to talk about blockchain with this group of people again. Second, I was impressed with just how deep of a dive the facilitator has been taking trying to learn about the metaverse.
He really understands just how important it is going to be for the students that we now see in our hallways. He was talking about many concepts that 
It was exciting!
On my side of things, there was a guy at my table who is a teacher in a neighboring district. While all of us in this group are very involved in technology, I would probably hold him a little higher level than some of the others.
He was very interested in what I had to say. Between presentations, I gave him a crash course in Proof of Work, Delegated Proof of Stake, NFTs, the birth and evolution of HIVE, DeFi, decentralization, and about twenty other blockchain concepts I can't even remember right now.
I offered to set up a HIVE account for him, but I don't think he is quite there yet. He did take my info and perhaps one day he will be ready.
I know this post has kind of been all over the place, but like the title says, my point is... The Metaverse is everywhere. Both figurative and soon to be literally. People are starting to talk about it. It's unfortunate that Facebook is the thing that really got people started, but they are talking about it nonetheless.
Combine that with the fact that people are starting to get excited about crypto again (albeit probably not for the right reasons), and I think we are approaching a head on collision of science fiction becoming reality.
