As Metaverse Land Prices Plummet, Mark Cuban Says Buying Digital Land Is 'the Dumbest Sh*t Ever' (fortune.com) 70
Mark Cuban, the billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner and avid crypto enthusiast, is not sold on the metaverse. "The worst part is that people are buying real estate in these places. That's just the dumbest shit ever," he told the crypto-themed YouTube channel Altcoin Daily this past weekend. From a report: Cuban's comments come as the hype surrounding the metaverse -- a term that loosely describes an emerging virtual world where people can hang out, play, and shop -- seems to be cooling. Last November, Facebook changed its name to Meta, spurring a flurry of excitement about the potential of the metaverse, which fueled a land grab for digital plots in so-called metaverse platforms created by the likes of the Sandbox and Decentraland.
These platforms enable investors to buy land as an NFT, which can be developed with virtual buildings or experiences or resold on secondary markets like NFT exchange OpenSea. Companies like Warner Music Group, Atari, Samsung, and Adidas have all bought digital land -- a move that Cuban, based on his latest comments, appears unlikely to follow. Cuban also isn't buying the central claim of metaverse land speculators that scarcity will make these digital plots valuable. "It's not even as good as a URL or an ENS [Ethereum naming service], because there's unlimited volumes that you can create," he said during the YouTube interview. Despite being an investor in Yuga Labs, the owner of popular NFT collections Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, Cuban said he was not a fan of the company's land sale, which raised about $317 million for its metaverse platform Otherside in April. "I still thought it was dumb to do the real estate. That was great money for them, you know, but that wasn't based off a utility," he said.
These platforms enable investors to buy land as an NFT, which can be developed with virtual buildings or experiences or resold on secondary markets like NFT exchange OpenSea. Companies like Warner Music Group, Atari, Samsung, and Adidas have all bought digital land -- a move that Cuban, based on his latest comments, appears unlikely to follow. Cuban also isn't buying the central claim of metaverse land speculators that scarcity will make these digital plots valuable. "It's not even as good as a URL or an ENS [Ethereum naming service], because there's unlimited volumes that you can create," he said during the YouTube interview. Despite being an investor in Yuga Labs, the owner of popular NFT collections Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, Cuban said he was not a fan of the company's land sale, which raised about $317 million for its metaverse platform Otherside in April. "I still thought it was dumb to do the real estate. That was great money for them, you know, but that wasn't based off a utility," he said.
Owner of multiple NFT collections... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Owner of multiple NFT collections... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, you can look at it in a different light. We've got somebody willing to buy into something tangentially connected, and even HE thinks this is stupid.
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Well, okay as an FP branch, but the joke I was searching for was more along the lines of "Hold my beer". But I see the moderators have apparently been satiated already?
And yet Mark Cuban is too rich to care. He probably has a designated and professional "beer holder" following him around for any occasion where he feels the need to do something stupid with his couch cushions' money.
"If you think buying digital land is stupid, how'd you like to see my huge NFT collection?"
(And no, I'm not giving up my day job
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Hmmm... talking comedy, I think you should take another swing at your already karmically maxed-out post in pursuit of "hold my beer". I thought it was funny, but I didn't get to your destination. Can we revise it?
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I wish I could remember the joke about "I wouldn't recognize a funny comment if it bit me in the keyboard."
Will you settle for the old goodie?
http://www.bash.org/?835030 [bash.org]
It's short, but can't be cut-and-pasted into Slashdot without editorial repairs. How dare bash.org use "special" characters? But for a good time, click on "Random" to consume (or waste) some of yours.
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Translation (Score:2)
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It's kind of like saying "you know it's bad when even the dog won't eat it."
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Zuck is trying to steal the future's thunder from the past but he doesn't understand it. The real metaverse will have decentralized ownership.
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It may start out that way but once big money gets involved it will centralize anyway. The only hope would be to build it that way from the ground up and purposely put obstacles in the way to make centralization difficult.
The Internet was suppose to be much more decentralized but when huge data centers hold large swaths of content it becomes much more centralized. Sure, the entire Internet does not go down but could very well be all the interesting content does.
Still, I like your idea and hope it comes to fr
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I don't think you understand it either.
Re:Buy the dip (Score:5, Informative)
And real estate, actual land, is limited, thus it will always have value. Digital land is only as limited as the world-crafters make it, so its value is questionable at best, worthless at worst.
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The world-crafters would have to add in the artificial scarcity and then some kind of live show that can only be experienced via VR-headset could be valuable.
I could eventually see people doing VR music shows and you would put your headset on to attend the event. It's nothing compared to a real show but it could also be a totally different yet unique experience that young people would latch onto because it's not their parents stuff. Also seniors that no longer want to travel longer distances but might still
Re: Buy the dip (Score:2)
It makes perfectly good sense (Score:3)
As long as the VR world is actually popular, people who want to flaunt their wealth or sell/advertise something will likely want prime real estate. The VR world will likely have teleportation portals rather than completely free teleportation, so there will be some travel/discovery involved in getting any where.
The problem is creating a popular VR world.
Re:It makes perfectly good sense (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is the same as with the rest of the web: Escaping the slew of advertising and getting where you want to be.
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Why do you need 'prime real estate' in VR, when everything can be bigger on the inside than it is on the outside?
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You are thinking of Metaverse in the way you are GOD and can build anything you can imagine on your plot of land.
Corporate on the other hand, they are thinking you are a money tree that needs to be fleeced and will severely cripple what can be done on your plot.
If things really take off, you will get real world laws dictating how the land can be used. Then comes the permits, licensing fees, taxes, etc, just like real life. That will be the only "official" Metaverse. Any other area is just imitation or downr
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Nah, the future ain't Cyberpunk. Companies will not take over, they will just compete.
Trying to lock you into their VR world and monetize you, but not to the point of driving you away. Also it's an open question how large the audience really is. I think an expertly coded and run VR version of Second Life could support a large economy, but not the size to satisfy Meta. It could always just be a niche.
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Lure in window shoppers, put up billboards, to show off.
Re:Utility, meh. (Score:5, Insightful)
but the rule of "location, location, location" still holds.
No it doesn't.
Location in the real world is important because space is limited, unique and physically related. In the digital world, the "next" place on some arbitrary axis and some remote place somewhere else are essentially the same distant from "here", because of fast travel, teleportation "/set location=1,2,3" or whatever other means you have. If whatever VR world you visit doesn't have such options yet, it will have them in the future because the same way people want cars and trains and planes so they don't have to walk for hours somewhere they will demand such features.
A virtual shopping centre won't be shops next to each other taking up real space in the neighbourhood. It will be a series of billboards ("shop windows") with portals into the real shop located somewhere where space is not an issue, just in case you want to expand in the future. Also, the same shop will be accessible from many different places.
Re:Utility, meh. (Score:5, Insightful)
For virtual homes, you are probably right in most cases. But many shops rely not on people who know what they want and where to get it, but on random traffic, people browsing, and so on. And that shopping experience, randomly walking, browsing, seeing and trying things that catch your interest, is what people are missing from the current online shops, and that's something the Metaverse can actually offer. In that model, location will still be key. You may be right that the shop itself will not be located on triple A real estate, and instead consist of a shop window plus portal, but even so, the location of that shop window will still be rather important, and still occupy some prime real estate.
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And that shopping experience, randomly walking, browsing, seeing and trying things that catch your interest, is what people are missing from the current online shops, and that's something the Metaverse can actually offer.
Gazing with watery eyes at a poorly rendered 3D model does not sell me on this.
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Wait until it essentially looks like real life or maybe just a notch down. The new Xbox Madden already looks real enough. VR will get there and then will be really interesting.
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VR will get there
The 80s, 90s, 00s and 10s all called to ask their VR catch-phrase back.
We've been waiting for VR to "get there" for as long as I've known that computers exist. And I'm a fucking dinosaur.
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That's because they couldn't text
But seriously, I totally get it. As I'm only 38, I'm still hoping before I die they will come out with something awesome that I would actually want to use.
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Games.
Skyrim in VR with a treadmill in a cave (not a bulky headset) with tech from 20 years in the future, that'd be totally awesome. In a game, you want immersion, you are ready to just overlook imperfections, that's the one and only use-case for VR.
Any real work or activity in VR is bullshit. Nobody wants to sit at a virtual desk and nobody wants to live in a virtual world once the novelty wears off. Unless we go so far down the dystopia path that living in the real world becomes unbearable and VR is simp
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The point remains that the spatial relationship of the things in the hotspot are entirely arbitrary.
If the local night club is the hippest place in the world to be, then the cofeeshop right next to it is pretty hot property too, so if you own the property next to it... kaching.
In the virtual world, owning the property 'next to it' is entirely meaningless. If I control a closed metaverse and mcdonalds pays me a bunch of cash, then now there's a mcdonalds between your coffeeshop and the night club.
And if the
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Instead actual google search is actually much more like what a successful metaverse hub will be... the hotspots will be organically driven largely by what people want, and people will be able to continually bid to have their properties included 'next' to those organic hotspots, with the highest bidders getting the spots,.for days or even just hours or minutes at a time.
That is an interesting idea that has been floating about in literature, and I am sure FB will have considered such a model. It does not remove the notion of high value real estate from the equation, but it erodes the notion of property. Thus far, virtual environments have had more of a sense of permanence, modeled around property ownership, but seeing the kind of company moving into this market lately, it might well go the way you describe, with the increase in value of virtual property not going to the p
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If what people wanted wasn't ranked high because ALL the top results were paid for by people who wanted to be close to the action
Technically that is what happens today.
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Yes to some extent, and of course there is a market for search rankings.. but that's not the whole system. I find sutff on google often and easily at the top of the results that nobody is paying google anything for.
Re: Utility, meh. (Score:2)
In VR the crowds are far more temporary as nothing physical stops them from going somewhere else. It's all a whim.
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you'll almost always see hot spots develop, where people (and buildings) tend to aggregate.
Yes, but we've been there, done that. The whole "portals" thing was replaced by good search engines.
Sure, hot spots will develop. And having a billboard there is the new equivalent of frontpage ads. But people don't STAY in the hotspot. "wanna grab a coffee" in the center of, say, Rome, will lead you to an expensive cafe because they're all expensive and it's too inconvenient to walk somewhere more reasonable. But in a virtual world "you can get that same thing for 20% less elsewhere" is literally one searc
Re:Utility, meh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Location in the real world is important because space is limited, unique and physically related. In the digital world, the "next" place on some arbitrary axis and some remote place somewhere else are essentially the same distant from "here", because of fast travel, teleportation "/set location=1,2,3" or whatever other means you have. If whatever VR world you visit doesn't have such options yet, it will have them in the future because the same way people want cars and trains and planes so they don't have to walk for hours somewhere they will demand such features.
This will depend on how the organization that manages the structure of the virtual environment, and how rigid the control they have over what can be done inside it. It's fictional, but you can look at the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash for an example -- the area immediately 'around' the Street has a physics model imposed on it, limiting what can be done, with Downtown being the brightest and most in-your face section. Restricting what can be done allows whatever organization is managing the VR environment to control what gets displayed and how people move in the environment, which lets them monetize the more 'important' or 'better' parts of the environment. There may be travel hacks, like having a business issue you a virtual door card that lets you 'travel' to the location that they've set up for their business in that environment, but if they don't have a visual presence in the core of the environment where the most people are, they'll lose market share to the ones that do.
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Location in the real world is important because space is limited, unique and physically related. In the digital world, the "next" place on some arbitrary axis and some remote place somewhere else are essentially the same distant from "here", because of fast travel, teleportation "/set location=1,2,3" or whatever other means you have. If whatever VR world you visit doesn't have such options yet, it will have them in the future because the same way people want cars and trains and planes so they don't have to walk for hours somewhere they will demand such features.
This will depend on how the organization that manages the structure of the virtual environment, and how rigid the control they have over what can be done inside it. It's fictional, but you can look at the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash for an example -- the area immediately 'around' the Street has a physics model imposed on it, limiting what can be done, with Downtown being the brightest and most in-your face section. Restricting what can be done allows whatever organization is managing the VR environment to control what gets displayed and how people move in the environment, which lets them monetize the more 'important' or 'better' parts of the environment. There may be travel hacks, like having a business issue you a virtual door card that lets you 'travel' to the location that they've set up for their business in that environment, but if they don't have a visual presence in the core of the environment where the most people are, they'll lose market share to the ones that do.
I'd suggest it could be more like the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons. What is the reason to have a "street", when the doorway that exits your current location can be mapped directly onto the doorway that enters your next location? If we're all portaling among worlds, then he who controls the portal tech - and the interstices that happen inside those portals - controls the world. In a way, the quick Youtube ads that autoplay between one video and the next already are the mall concourse you stroll between one
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What you just described make me want to kill myself, what the fuck. Imagine the only way to shop would be to go through these ad tunnels. It's torture for someone that really doesn't see ads besides the few billboards my city allows.
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What you just described make me want to kill myself, what the fuck. Imagine the only way to shop would be to go through these ad tunnels. It's torture for someone that really doesn't see ads besides the few billboards my city allows.
Which means that's probably close to what they'll end up doing.
Once everything is on the Internet and there's no local processing, it doesn't matter if the technology allows you to jump directly from one address to another address. The very process of hyperlinking/redirecting is happening on their server. All you have is some goggles/implants rendering the sensory output. This is why the Browser Wars were such a big deal and why Chrome and Edge are so eager to "help" you by storing/syncing all your cookies,
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In the Virtual World, it is Permissions, Permissions, Permissions
With the proper Permissions, I can drop my virtual storefront on top of your "homesteaded" patch and nobody is the wiser
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With infinite dimensions, everybody can live next door to the hot celebrity.
But maybe it's like the web, and it's not about location but how convenient your URL is. Domain squatters wouldn't exist unless they were potentially valuable.
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If you don't force physical scarcity on the world, you can't really create property values. If you are trying to make a virtual mall that you would walk around in and just discover stuff, then walking past a bunch of billboards that you could enter and be taken to the store would be quite cool.
My imagination is of course I put on the headset and gloves and POP! I'm in the Matrix or a holodeck. Matrix would be the official metaverse and holodecks would be private spaces.
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but the rule of "location, location, location" still holds.
No it doesn't.
Location in the real world is important because space is limited, unique and physically related. In the digital world, the "next" place on some arbitrary axis and some remote place somewhere else are essentially the same distant from "here", because of fast travel, teleportation "/set location=1,2,3" or whatever other means you have. If whatever VR world you visit doesn't have such options yet, it will have them in the future because the same way people want cars and trains and planes so they don't have to walk for hours somewhere they will demand such features.
A virtual shopping centre won't be shops next to each other taking up real space in the neighbourhood. It will be a series of billboards ("shop windows") with portals into the real shop located somewhere where space is not an issue, just in case you want to expand in the future. Also, the same shop will be accessible from many different places.
You could say the same about websites, it doesn't matter where they are located or who they are hosted by but "location, location, location" still rings true in other ways. Your website and google rankings matter. That's how people find your business on the web. So good web addresses go for megabucks and people pay for SEO.
In a virtual world, something else would define "location" rather than a physical location... Well it would eventually if VR was more than just a gimmick. I picture it being more like
Re:Utility, meh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't we already have these discussions back in the Second Life era? Anyone remember what the global consensus was on owning virtual real estate back then?
Exact. Same. Thing. (Score:3)
Re:Exact. Same. Thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this guy a billionaire?
The same way most billionaires - connections and/or family, luck at the right moment, tenacity to make it stick, and once you're past the glass ceiling, other people tend to give you their money.
Re:Exact. Same. Thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
luck at the right moment
And for Cuban's case that had a lot to do with it, he got bought out during the height of the dot-com-boom by selling broadcast.com/audionet to Yahoo for $5.7B in stock. He at least seems aware of it though.
Yahoo!'s costly purchase of Broadcast.com is now regarded as one of the worst internet acquisitions of all time. Broadcast.com and Yahoo!'s other broadcasting services were discontinued within a few years after the acquisition.[42] Cuban has repeatedly described himself as very lucky to have sold the company before the dot-com bubble burst. However, he also emphasized that he hedged against the Yahoo! shares he received from the sale and would have lost most of his fortune if he had not done so.
Re:Exact. Same. Thing. (Score:5, Informative)
Cuban's original Broadcast.com offering was a comprehensive collection of exclusive internet streaming rights to major league sports. The sales pitch was that Packers fans in Oklahoma could watch their favorite teams' games over the internet while local broadcasts only offered the local teams' games. Reality of it was, this was the era of the 14.4k modem and the video stream would have to be downscaled to a postage stamp and impossible to recognize things like a football let alone a baseball, etc. But he had ALL the contracts and that seemed like a valuable property to the Yahoo board of directors, who were really casting nets at that time to figure out how to make their own property generate revenue. He came out of that sale with $2b cash and plowed it into the Dallas Mavericks and HD.net. The former won a championship, the latter was an attempt to capitalize on cable high definition content while the other networks were still catering to standard def. Once everything else switched to HD, his network became devoid of purpose.
He finds greater fools (Score:5, Insightful)
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So, why is buying bits of code from bitcoin, ethereum, etc. the wave of the future, while buying bits of code from the metaverse the 'dumbest shit ever'? How is this guy a billionaire?
Because some people are convinced that there are still enough "bigger fools" out there willing to pay them for the bitcoin, ethereum, etc that they hold.
"real" estate (Score:5, Insightful)
"The worst part is that people are buying real estate..."
Shouldn't it be "unreal estate" or "fictional estate" or "digital estate" or something? It definitely isn't REAL in any sense of the word that's not coming out of the mouth of a marketing dude.
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Mod parent something? Maybe "unreal"?
(I really like the idea of unreal estate and the unrealitor salespeople. (But I think "realtor" is a trademark?)
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It's real in the same sense that having control over some area or thing that other people find desirable is something people value. Especially if this virtual real estate is unique and can then be sold later at a profit. It's like having gold in an MMO. It's usually tradable for real world money, therefore it has some real value.
Being that it's from facebook/meta/whatever does drop it's value considerably but the idea still sounds neat or will be in the future.
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But you don't have control in any sense of the word comparable to actual real estate.
There is always the layer of the VR system, which is owned by someone else. That someone can at any time withdraw, change, modify, or do whatever the heck they want with your un-real estate. Sure, you can afterwards sue them for breach of contract, maybe. But factually, THEY have all the control and you have only whatever they grant you. You can't even sell it to someone else without them noting the transfer of ownership in
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Replace them with government, what's the real difference? Sure, on a technical level, they could absolutely stop you from breaking a rule where as in meatspace you can go ahead and build your extension onto your house without a permit, but the city will eventually notice and you will pay dearly for not getting the permit.
Even doing work inside of your home without a permit means that when you eventually sell, you legally can't say you have a 3 bedroom because you never got permits, etc.
All the laws we have
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Replace them with government, what's the real difference?
Everything. I am in factual control of my property right now. The government can NOT just press a button and change that. Sure they can bring an overwhelming force and would probably win a conflict with superior firepower, but it's not automatic, it's not low-effort, and it requires a public display of force. Same with taking my legal rights.
There's a HUGE difference between someone being powerful enough to enforce something, and someone being technically god and able to just do whatever they want without e
The "real" metaverse... is already here (Score:4, Insightful)
The metaverse is a concept, not a single instance. It exists on servers around the world in a multitude of forms -- not all of which are VR based. Most people envision the metaverse as nothing more than a collection of video games -- and in a sense, even the more involved instances really are exactly that. From Minecraft [minecraft.net] to No Man's Sky [nomanssky.com], virtual world building has existed for years... and in both of these examples, the initial purchase price and a little bit of time and effort is all you are really required to invest in order to tap into virtually unlimited potential.
Zuckerberg isn't some amazing visionary who just happened to wake up one morning with with this grand new idea that nobody else had ever conceived. He's just a guy who got his hands on an Oculus -- and was so enamored with the possibilities that he decided to buy the company. Then he watched Ready Player One and mistakenly thought he saw himself reflected in the character of James Halliday... so he decided to rename his own company to reflect his new personal mission. Then he realized that VR hardware at anything approaching affordable prices for consumers is an absolute money pit for the company that makes them... so he increased the price of his VR devices, without changing their features in any way. And even with that, he is almost certainly still many, many years away from turning a profit on anything related to either VR or the metaverse.
So yeah... Cuban is absolutely right to shun Zuckerberg's particular "vision" of the metaverse -- but not necessarily for the reasons that he assumes.
All Social is doomed (Score:2)
Deja Vu (Score:3)
Second Life 2.0
Re: Deja Vu (Score:3)
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Buying high and selling low was a dumb investment. Buying low and selling high is a smart investment and even after the crash of the hype, people have still been making money that way in Second Life. Also a lot of people just want to model stuff and put it in an online world for others to see, people will pay for that privilege because they get pleasure out of it. Which is also not dumb.
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or, Second Second Life
Cuban probably wants to buy in lower (Score:2)
Ooh... (Score:1)
'Cause that would be SO COOL! I'll put it right up there on my shelf with my Beanie Babies and Pet Rocks.