Rest of the paper reads more like it was written by an early GPT than Neal Stephenson. "Blockchains for the metaverse" does feel like something from a two page

Rest of the paper reads more like it was written by an early GPT than Neal Stephenson. "Blockchains for the metaverse" does feel like something from a two page digression in the middle of a Stephenson novel, but that would at least cover what they were trying to do, why it turned out to be a terrible idea and how the villain ended up fleecing the idealistic hackers...