I have to chime in on this one and hopefully offer a bit of clarification to the misconceptions.
Philip Rosedale's HiFi project is positioned to be far more awesome than Second Life ever was. As of now, because they're still on a beta level, and even though I've followed the progress since I heard about it, even I am not entirely sure what they're doing beyond developing a true multiverse platform. Philip Rosedale is a big proponent and supporter of bitcoin, he's as much an eager transhumanist as I am, and if you follow him and his ventures then you'd understand better what the point of Second Life ever was.
Firstly, it's not and never was a game. It's a platform for building in 3D, and while the viewer is still limited by the technology's current stage in the overall evolution of technology, it is a superbly easy (however basic) method of creating 3D virtual reality. But unlike the more graphically appealing 3d content used in video games that are static and preprogrammed, what makes SL phenomenal is the fact the technology renders the environment 100% live. You literally watch the world or environment being created before your eyes via the viewer you use. Nearly a decade ago the viewers were coded to render 3d mesh and in fact, all of the components are low poly mesh anyway and that changed things tremendously as 3d modeling is a huge money making industry now. If you've ever wanted to jump into 3d, there's a totally free way to do so and learn the ropes (small learning curve) that's much more appealing than the learning curve for learning Blender or Maya or the high end, expensive 3d modeling platforms.
The other phenomenal thing about the platform running SL is the built in social network option that allows you and others to enter the same environment real time, build or play or whatever you're into, and not even Unity or Unreal can pull that off effectively without enormous costs.
Add to the above the built in economy - Linden Lab already incorporated micro payments and digital currency, and was a pioneer in the whole thing so millions of people are now well primed to embrace things like bitcoin and Square Cash and micro payments. This is a good thing. I don't know today what the exchange rates are in SL but about a decade ago about 250 Lindens was the equivalent of a dollar.
A simulated plot of land was being sold - and still is, apparently - through Linden Lab for a whopping $1600 set up fee and another 295 bucks a month...and you might think people who paid that had no first lives but you'd be oh so wrong. There were millions of people across the world who had several sims - meaning they forked over 1600 bucks per set up and were paying nearly 300 a month for each one...so losers with poor first lives they were not...they had a shit ton of money to even be able to afford one region, let alone dozens. Losers with no lives don't have the ability to fork over nearly 10 grand a month on a glorified chat room just so they can pretend to be a furry.
There's a bit more going on here than the superficial accusations leveled seem to bear out.
Oh, and bitcoin's already been traded in SL and has been for a few years already. Dollars exchanged for Lindens that are then exchanged to bitcoin. The problem is with Linden Lab's current CEO - they want to be a virtual world facebook, they are a closed system and started locking down on third party systems so they can be proprietary. They are losing their asses these days because of it.
Second Life also provided content creators the option to make money and keep their money, so these 'no life having losers' were more along the lines of clever entrepreneurs, creating remarkable textures, builds, clothing, skin/shape, hair and accessories for decorating the avatars, scripting and all sorts of components to make the environment more immersive than a glorified chat room.
In a decade, though it's all still "cartoon like" (not SL's fault, it's current technology's fault), the graphics capabilities have gone from this:
to this:
and there's been an amazing upgrade in the physics engines so that warfare, combat, transportation/movement, and other effects become seamless and realistic.
But it's still not a game. You can create games to play in the environments but the platform isn't a game. It's a 3d environment builder.
Now...the point of it was inspired by the book Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson) and you can find details on all that in various videos from/of Philip Rosedale but the bottom line was 3D Internet itself. The "multiverse" in 3D...websites in 3D...the world wide web in 3D but each hosted independently and peer to peer instead of a central location allowing or disallowing access to the interwebs.
With 3D tech exploding and evolving, getting into 3D world building is a lucrative business to venture into. There is at least one viewer that has been developed to work with Oculus Rift when it's officially released to the consumer so these very virtual worlds can be accessed as an experience. With the evolution of WebGL and HTML5, and the modification of this very platform (and the intro of new tech), the day is coming soon where instead of static, flat, one dimensional web pages, your online experience will be an offline experience, porting into whole environments, grids of worlds in the metaverse, but with the ability to interact and engage with others also there at the same time, to trade information, currency, goods and services, do business, learn, and even create things that can be ported directly to your 3D printer that you'll inevitably end up getting.
Decentralization at its finest.
Granted HiFi domains are a little non intuitive and the avatars look like Saturday morning toons had sex with the homunuculus but they're just getting started. Philip Rosedale handed Linden Lab off after making a gazillion dollars and what he's working on now is an evolution of what he'd wanted SL to be...but SL ended up being a commercialized chat room with enormous drama from crackpots.
Don't underestimate it though...there is some serious creativity happening and a shit ton of money being made and traded in SL even now.
I got my feet wet in SL, I spent thousands of dollars myself but ended up leaving because of the reality that anything I created became sole property of Linden Lab and I couldn't take it with me or take ownership of it.
I moved to OpenSim - exactly the same platform *base* used for Second Life, but modified and evolved and 100% free. It's "hypergrid enabled" meaning I can run the server on my machine and others can "visit" the environments created...and this is the current foundation for independently owned and operated metaverse 3d web...bitcoin is just now being incorporated in creative ways by a number of people running OpenSim grids and within a couple more years when the VR headsets and tools have hit the market and people are developing their own world domains that are replacing web sites and static profiles, we'll all be doing things far differently than we're doing today, and with much more real privacy.
What sold me on Second Life back in 2006 was the rendering of these worlds before my eyes. I was hooked, and forking over hundreds of dollars my first month because I saw the potential, where this was going. It was like walking around in other peoples' dreams...and when you approach the platform that way, the world expands and you see all sorts of delicious opportunities for this technology.
OpenSim, the devs behind it, Rosedale and HiFi are all compatible with the entire foundation of the blockchain and bitcoin - peer to peer web experience, real time virtual and augmented reality that's under individual control, not a centralized agency.
Now...look at the potential applications from a fresh, better informed perspective
