every time i start having doubts about crypto as a technology, is it an "industry" worth staying & building in, i think about video games and the decades long trajectory it took to get to where it is today (honestly you could do the same with PCs, software, the internet or any tech, but i feel like i've lived through & participated in a good chunk of what is modern gaming today so have more direct insights).

pretty much all machines & gaming consoles from back in the day had a vision about home gaming and thus worked hard to attract devs to publish titles for their environments (atari vs intellivision, sega vs nintendo, sony vs microsoft, etc.), using distribution, co-marketing and investments as incentives to collaborate. and for every "weird" broderbund, sierra, EA and activision (and those are just in the US) that sprung up, you had corpo products by warner, fox, mattel and even general mills (!), mainly releasing "slop" but still some gems (or maybe that's just nostalgia?).

(however, and i often think about and go back & forth on this as i know it's easier said than done as well as this decades to achieve, but one major difference by the early console companies is that they were ultimately able to build the distribution needed to cultivate bigger built-in audiences for game makers to then also thrive. not to say that the games themselves were of secondary importance as good titles were/are necessary to convince users to buy both machine and games, but attracting users is definitely something that both apps and chains/protocols are significantly challenged by in crypto)

and just to take the comparison one step further, those early titles were hardcoded to the machines so very hard to port to other environments, no real interoperability for games until the internet so you really had to convince users to go in on a platform as the investment was relatively huge!

but i digress and to get back to my point, for those of us who're still kind of "in it for the tech," we shouldn't feel too discouraged on progress made, that we're not doing as "bad" as we'd like to think when it appears that the casino side is "winning" and the corpo side is catching up/taking over as non enthusiast builders are seeing more the tech's utility; and it should be remembered that like with video games, we must accept that mainstream adoption, which seems so obvious and inevitable today, is not at all what early adopters imagined (build what you want, connect & play, digital economies, etc.) and so "hobbyists" need to get even weirder and go in directions more less obvious, particularly to keep the rails open and accessible, which are the values of the internet that are really under attack imo (fuck the Fifas, Maddens and FPSs, i want more indie titles, which i do believe we're in a kind of golden era rn!)

started this cast because i was frustrated by blockchain & protocol foundations that are increasingly skeptical towards builders and supporting/funding projects building on top of them, claiming that it's the builders' responsibility to bring users, while perfectly happy to vampire claim any traction brought/incoming. i get why, especially when teams lie, cheat and take whatever they can get & run and "users" tend to be major distractions as tokenholders, value extractors, fake communities only in it for the pumps, botnets, ebeggars, etc.; but i also think it's an easy out to use slogans like "build things people want" while not taking into account that emerging categories/industries can be very different, need time to grow and evolve like we've seen with video games (how many companies grew, crash and burned and faded away to get to where the space is today in spite of being called scams, fads, bubbles, etc.?). and if ecosystem stewards (and supposed crypto VCs, if any are left and not all gone to AI) aren't committed to building foundations like those old console companies and investors were, then it's only natural people (and bots!) lose interest and move on to the next thing that captures our attention.

maybe this rant is not so novel, is all over the place and not directionally correct? in any case, i don't usually like to wax philosophical about crypto shit, but i think my (relatively older) age and direct witnessing of & participation in several relevant digital culture changes are things i can offer with more confidence than usual, so thank you for coming to my /ted talk ✌️

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