1/ I inhaled Masters of Doom over the last couple evenings. Aside from being a super engaging read, it reminded me of a lot of similarities between the early gaming & crypto communities. amazon.com/Masters-Doom-C…
2/ In the early days, the violence in video games caused a backlash from conservatives who wanted to ban them. One case went all the way to the Supreme Court, but was ultimately dismissed.
3/ The parallel here is the narrative of crypto being used for drug dealing and nefarious activity - in the early days bitcoin was the target, and now it has become privacy coins. Trying to ban these things rarely (if ever) works.
4/ It was a huge hassle to play games in the early days - initially they had to be typed in by hand, they were slow, computers weren’t readily available, etc etc. And yet, gamers couldn’t get enough of them.
5/ This is so clearly the phase we are still in for cryptocurrencies and dApps. Most require a decent base of technical knowledge, a willingness to experiment, and a tolerance for poor UX.
6/ Game developers were also limited not by the limits of their creativity, but by the boundaries of the technology. PCs were initially too slow to run any good games - and only eventually did some of the best technical minds come up with solutions.
7/ The crypto parallel is scalability: as CryptoKitties demonstrated, right now most dApps are limited by speed and throughout issues on the underlying chains. I believe that like PCs eventually got up to speed, we will figure out how to scale blockchains as well.
8/ But the most important similarity between today’s crypto and 1990s gaming worlds is the religious fervor of both communities.
9/ The early game creators also pioneered the concept of shareware, where games were distributed for free, and paid for on a voluntary, donation basis by the gamers.
10/ The gamers didn’t have to pay - they chose to, despite it not being immediately financially rational to do so. Amazingly, they donated millions of dollars in this fashion.
11/ In my mind, this maps to HODLers - they’re holding for the eventual financial upside, but also due to a strong ideological belief.
12/ Any piece of technology that can create a movement - and a group of people who MUST HAVE IT - is basically unstoppable.
13/ I’m increasingly convinced that in crypto, the coins with the strongest communities are going to be the winners. As @bendavenport put it, missionaries always trump mercenaries. /fin
