Taking Sides

This popped up in my feed today - it's @ned (or possibly his dad) advertising "The Wonder Computer of the 1980s".

For those racking their brains to remember which one that was, it was the Vic-20 by Commodore.

During those heady days of 8-bit micros people were making an investment in a platform in the same way that we're choosing between blockchains now. Not only were the machines going to do something for us now, but they would be friendly brands for the rest of our computing lives. Except they weren't, most brands lasted a few years and by the time we were into the 1990s the main choice was now Mac vs PC.

Will our chains be any different? There's no way of knowing, but it seems likely that there'll be consolidation and evolution based on what is seen to work and what doesn't. We also now have an established way of developing open source software, which means evolution probably works even more quickly. Back then we had to wait for someone like Clive Sinclair to come up with innovation, now we can do the equivalent of "forking" the Vic-20 to make it more like the sort of thing we need.

And yet we also behave tribally about our chains - writing on Steemit and holding STEEM power doesn't feel like a loose, flexible relationship. If I sold all my STEEM for something else, it would be a statement about who I am and what I'm doing - not a very exciting statement, but, if aggregated with others then maybe a sell (or buy) signal to others. There's a feeling of commitment not just to the platform but the currency itself, even though they're all pretty fungible, if you work hard enough at it.

And it's easy to pick up another currency or platform and have a play - when your VIC ran out of steam and your choice was either a C64, a Spectrum or (ugh!) a BBC Micro it was an expensive choice to get wrong.