Sorry I can't disagree with your analysis Russell ;-)

It all looks good to me.

But maybe I can enhance it a little with how energy appears to fit with all of this.

I've spent the last five years or so studying what I saw was an energy problem coming around 2017 whilst working on a Metaverse related PhD candidate project, with a view to developing something to market whilst enhancing my qualifications at that time.

It became apparent that my product needed a stable virtual world, one that serves all people, centred around a common digital twin of the real world.

The thing preventing that, is the conflict of interest experienced by the platform owners, who have no choice but to profit from the platform users. So that immediately splits everyone involved into two opposing camps with slightly different interests; owners and users - not sutiable for my Use Case at the time.

So I tried to come up with some platform ideas suggesting ways to use crypto-currencies etc to generate in-world value in a way that would equally benefit all users, such that it would comprise an open, distributed, self-governed system like Bitcoin, even using Ai to manage things.

But playing around with the concept of crypto-currencies takes us quickly to the connection with energy, and the conclusion that the energy source to a virtual world or metaverse is the thing generating unavoidable overheads. This is the thing that with all other things removed, still a revenue has to be drawn from users, by some kind of trusted authority, which again splits users into opposing camps, just to pay the energy bill.

So then we start to look at energy and scrutinise why it has to cost money, and we fall down a black hole, until we realise that the fundamental cost of energy as we've conventionally used it is firstly that it comes from irreplaceable stores on Earth, and secondly that it almost always requires a certain amount of labor to extract said Joules from whichever Medium they happen to be "Trapped" within, on Earth.

Then we notice that the energy in sunlight doesn't have either of thsoe characteristics, it is pushed for free to us. It can truly be converted to anything we wish it to be, with no need of labor, to receive valuable product resulting, including even the hardware required to receive the Joules. And it comes with no depletion of product of any kind on Earth, or even from the sun, it truly is additional to all of the existing product on Earth, rather than subtracted, as is the case with any kind of energy from Earth.

So the solution for the ideal, fully sustainable metaverse is to supply it completely with solar power, potentially providing an income to all, without costing anyone anything.

As a long practicing model based Systems Engineer, it didn't take me long to realise that because a Metaverse is actually just a simulating model of the real world, with some virtual extensions, then what we are seeing as proof of impossibility of the sustainable metaverse, withut free energy is proof of the same impossibility that applies to the real world, it is literally unsustainable as things stand, with all of our power being derived from finite stores of various kinds on Earth. Even nuclear does not solve the problem, as it is just more energy from Earth, with toxic effects resulting from the extraction process, which can't be removed without yet more extraction. All of it is energy subtracted from Earth, and we see this manifest as all of the disastrous environmental effects we are seeing, including even viruses, and wars.

I won't carry on here to describe the solution in detail, it involves "Kardashev Money", and community based hydrogen backed solar, but as far as I can tell, the solution is watertight, it all fits together perfectly with the way nature works, transporting energy from the leaves of plants to all things that need it, after the plant initially builds up a tiniy energy deficit to the planet, until it sprouts leaves.

Our energy deficit is represented by our collective financial debt as a species, and can only be paid back down by solar.

This has started already by all developed countries now already putting tens of GigaJoules per second of solar sourced product into use.

But none of it is monetised, because to monetise it, money has to be issued for free to all people.

Money issued as debt can only tranalate to promises to do work, which in absence of all else, has to be the work of extraction.

See the problem?

So nature is the thing driving the current devaluation we are seeing in all money issued as debt, since while the unmonetised free solar product put to use continues to necessarily scale up, money is becoming increasingly less representative of actual product put to use.

How that has to end, is by permanent issue of massive stimulus for all people.

As I am sure you will agree, this, where it is known, must be causing huge concern amongst banks, money issuers, whale investors, governments, in fact anyone wielding capital to maintain political power, they are loath to issue money for free, because it removes the value of all capital, as we saw demonstrated when Trump issued 4Tn per month stimulus, a lot of very surprising things happened, he really upset the established order. I suspect it was accidental on his part, otherwise now he would be boasting that he was the only president to preside over an actual spike of improvement in the envrironment, as seen in coral and fish stocks at the time. It was also when oil prices went negative, the first time in history, and the dollar value itself went up, rather than down, which confounded pretty much all economists expectations.

The upshot of all of this is that there has to be issue of massive stimulus again on the cards, but this time it has to be left on, and this will turn the world of capitalism upside down.

There we might see either a truly biblical singularity, the biggest in thousands of years, or the end of days, we literally can't survive on any energy except solar, so all money has to go free, to correctly support it if we are to survive at all.

Not doing it, is like a plant not allowing the flow of nutrients within it to conduct the energy received by its leaves to all things needing it on Earth.

The plant would die.

Of course this wll automatically bring peace and sustainability to all things, the idea of jobs changes meaning completely, and we will see an explosion of geniuses doing all kinds of things that we can hardly imagine right now, due to our mindsets being restricted to the reference frame of a world running out of resources.

Also, Ai changes purpose from being something developed mostly to make profit for its owners, to something with no conflicts of interest, which will remove much of the hostility and suspicion we've had of Ai since its inception.

It won't be profit driven, like we've always been :)