But so many of these systems have only one implementation, and no spec. Matrix, Dat, and IPFS are all ahead of the game on that, even though Matrix has only one server implementation, AFAICT, and all the Dat tooling I've found is in node. It's better than Scuttlebot, in any case.
I'm not sure what you are talking about with this, but I thought Go had great cross platform support. Can you point me to a resource documenting your "Less than excellent track record"?
The worst horror story is that Go encodes the syscall table on most platforms, which can cause problems on platforms like Solaris, where the syscall table isn't guaranteed to remain the same over time. However, that code's been written, so Go may be better off than I thought.
In general, however, the more implementations, the better. So I maintain that we should build more implementations of the IPFS and dat protocols (they're apparently fairly similar). Because if we're building the next web, it cannot be linked to a single platform, especially if that platform is node, the only platform that all these new protocols seem to have bindings for.
Why? Because a lot of people don't like Node...
OTOH, I've heard a lot of dodgy things about Etherium, particularly from the currency side, and just the security in general.
IPFS is exciting, looking very much like Freenet from a publishing perspective, but without making anybody who want to see that data download a very cumbersome program (and the security, of course). The history system is also interesting. However, the single client and server implementation concerns me. Especially because it's written in Go. I don't make judgements about code quality by language (plenty of good programmers hack in Node and other JS environments), but if we're going to use this thing as the distributed platform of the future, it had better be cross-platform. And Go has a... Less than exellent track record for being easily ported (I won't go so far as to say that Golang Is Trash, but that post alone speaks volumes about the porting experience, and there have been plenty of others). Plenty of organizations run on BSD, Solaris, Illumos, or another Unix. If the future is coming, I'd rather they be part of it, and even if Go runs for them, I'd rather not make it any harder on then than necessary.