So I finally checked my Blurt airdrop

• 14k coins worth $140.

A penny per coin?

Pretty good. I'm impressed. I figured that's what Steem would be trading for by now :D

I guess it's worth double that a day later?

Silly crypto, go home!

You're drunk.

In any case, #Ionomy is cool for listing the project so fast. Always good to know that even super niche communities can get on/off ramps up and running quickly.

Which community is Blurt targeting?

I can't find the information regarding who they airdropped, which you'd think they'd put front and center, but I guess not. I'll just assume (confirmed) they did what they said they were going to do, which is airdrop everyone 1:1 before Steemit and friends "stole" 26M whatever coins from the top Hive brass.

And so the Blurt community is targeting a super duper niche group of people who don't want to be a part of the Hive or the Steem community, but at the same time airdropping everyone.

It's a clear recipe for disaster, but whatever.

So I was originally thinking that I should just dump the airdrop given to me and simply end my relationship with this network entirely, but I recently realized that's not the best idea, especially considering we are in the last leg of the Bitcoin halving cycle, and low-liquidity coins tend to do the craziest things.

Barring the speculation game (which is not how I make my investment decisions these days), I have a very fundamental reason to hang onto these gifted tokens.

My brand of development is unique.

Pretty much everyone who creates an app for this platform takes a centralized shortcut. They make a server that they control and then begin to connect strings to the network using services like Keychain to piggyback off of network security and utilizing the currency and built in onboarding.

What I'm trying to do, on the other hand, is create services that are run directly on the user's local machine. In theory, they connect to the network using the full node of their choice and send/receive information using that full-node as a proxy to get the network access I/O required to run the app.

The Graphene codebase has proven to be surprisingly reliable.

I'm still using scripts that I wrote years ago and they work perfectly. Once I get an interesting project up and running on Hive, I can basically port it to Blurt and Steem with extreme ease. In some cases, it might even be as easy as adding a single line of code to make the app work with an entirely different network. That is the power of decentralization hard at work right there.

Therefore, with this in mind, it would actually be kind of dumb to dump my blurt airdrop, because a tiny investment in Blurt could still translate into a huge return if any of my projects become successful, even though they are all initially targeting the Hive community. The value of plug-and-play software and interoperability can not be overstated in this case.

Take a more centralized project like Spinterlands for instance. We all know they stayed on Steem for an awkward amount of time until they finally said "enough is enough" and switched over to Hive. Why did it happen this way? Because switching networks is a pain in the ass for a project that centralized, and trying to juggle both at the same time is even worse. Devs who want to maintain unilateral control over their creations won't have access to the kind of flexibility that cross-platform development has to offer. And that's fine, for now.

Let it ride!

And so, I'm going to hang on to my airdrop as a matter of politics. I'm investing in myself and what I seek to accomplish in this space by doing so. Perhaps when I feel more confident about one of my projects I'll even go so far as to put some money back into Steem and Blurt from my own pocket. Blasphemy I know, but in this context it makes a lot of sense to include this action in my crypto journey.

Make no mistake, Hive is my number one and if my projects become to unwieldy to maintain in a decentralized manner I'll simply start taking those shortcuts and committing more to this network. However, there's simply no sense in making a commitment like that so early in the game when I'm not yet forced into it. It's an interesting topic to parse, to be sure. Will I be able to maintain a pure decentralized approach to developing Graphene applications, or will I eventually abandon that idealism and take a more pragmatic approach? Time will tell.

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