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> A lot of the companies in video games around the time of the blow up are gone now, but some of them survived -- Nintendo was early and is still around, Sega s

> A lot of the companies in video games around the time of the blow up are gone now, but some of them survived -- Nintendo was early and is still around, Sega survived until much after the crash. Wait, but the Famicom wasn't even released until 1983 (the year of the crash), and the Genesis wasn't released until '88, so it seems like those companies really rose from the ashes of the crash - even though Nintendo had been dabbling in video games since the 70s, the Famicom was their first attempt to really hit the US market it seems. > Re: cryptocurrencies, who knows, but the real question is if they're really useful compared to traditional banking, for enough people for it to offset the tremendous escalating costs of running the network. Don't mistake this by any means as me being a fanatic, because by no means am I anything less than incredibly skeptical of cryptocurrencies: I question whether it's just because nothing has really managed to prove that fruitful yet in comparison to the overwhelming use of them now as speculative investments. For example, we had to send a payment to someone who lives in a commonwealth country - what a pain in the ass that was. For the first time I actually saw a use for bitcoin, but the volatility and my general desire not to run afoul of any weird money laundering laws got the better of me.

ChickeNES 8y ago
>the Genesis wasn't released until '88, Sega released the SG-1000 on literally the same day as the Famicom's launch. In 1985 they introduced the Sega Master System, an upgraded SG-1000.
- wgerard 8y ago
  Oops! You are correct, though it looks like the SG-1000 was never released outside of JP. Still, not pre-crash.
toast0 8y ago
Most of the other companies dabbling in video games in the 70s and early 80s simply slowed dabbling. Ex Mattel didn't release any follow on consoles of note past the Itellivision, Coleco went on to focus more on Cabbage Patch Kids and a failing home computer after the Coleco Vision. But who didn't have a failing home computer back then? Nintendo and Sega continued to focus on them, during the downturn. Not a lot of people were really doing video games only then, Atari was a division of Warner Entertainment by the end of the 70s. Re crypto, international transfer does seem like an area that's poorly served and expensive with traditional banking, and family remittances is a huge submarket there, but it's only rarely mentioned in articles about bitcoin. I think the trick is there needs to be enough market activity to make bitcoins available for purchase in the sending country and sellable in the receiving country. But there's some competition here from PayPal and others.

ChickeNES 8y ago

>the Genesis wasn't released until '88, Sega released the SG-1000 on literally the same day as the Famicom's launch. In 1985 they introduced the Sega Master System, an upgraded SG-1000.

wgerard 8y ago
Oops! You are correct, though it looks like the SG-1000 was never released outside of JP. Still, not pre-crash.

toast0 8y ago

Most of the other companies dabbling in video games in the 70s and early 80s simply slowed dabbling. Ex Mattel didn't release any follow on consoles of note past the Itellivision, Coleco went on to focus more on Cabbage Patch Kids and a failing home computer after the Coleco Vision. But who didn't have a failing home computer back then? Nintendo and Sega continued to focus on them, during the downturn. Not a lot of people were really doing video games only then, Atari was a division of Warner Entertainment by the end of the 70s. Re crypto, international transfer does seem like an area that's poorly served and expensive with traditional banking, and family remittances is a huge submarket there, but it's only rarely mentioned in articles about bitcoin. I think the trick is there needs to be enough market activity to make bitcoins available for purchase in the sending country and sellable in the receiving country. But there's some competition here from PayPal and others.