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I feel like this has just been a casino built with entertainment and memes from the last 10 years. No one wants the old school casino experience of smoke-filled

I feel like this has just been a casino built with entertainment and memes from the last 10 years. No one wants the old school casino experience of smoke-filled rooms, classic table games, and shows any more. We just want to buy random tokens with questionable value, see a Shiba Inu dog show, and walk past a bunch of TV walls with Twitch streamers talking about how they got rich with some new coin on the way to buy legal weed. The whole movement is really good at making you feel dumb for following safe and conservative career advice like "do something practical, save your money, and retire eventually (maybe)". Why sit through yet another technical interview when you could just buy the right stock/cryptocoin?

nefitty 5y ago
It reminds me a lot of Terror Management Theory. Sure, there are apex predators who are knowingly scamming and defrauding people, but how do I describe a coworker who is enthusiastic about the $1000 of Bitcoin he has? Even a cursory, technically-minded dig in the garden shows that there's nothing at the center. Smart contracts require oracles. NFTs are addresses that depend on an external interface to make any sense of them. Blockchains are expensive public immutable databases... I tend to filter a lot of these crowd behaviors through the lens of Terror Management Theory. In this case, convincing others that crypto has some true value might not only benefit investors financially, but also reinforce their identity as part of some important movement. I think it's been a tragic waste of economic resources and brain power. Talk about "the smartest people of my generation spend their time figuring out how to make me click ads." If all of this energy had been pointed in the direction of innovating against the direct problem of abundance vs scarcity, it would have avoided becoming a joke. Otherwise, it's just a mimicry of the economic patterns that have dominated the West since its inception, and thus, not revolutionary in the least bit.
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  I used to think just like that (in general, not this particular topic). Today, it looks to me as a presumptuous way of considering what each person decides to do with they time and lives. One could as easily argue the oxygen you and I are breathing right now is a big waste of resources. Let's just let people do what they want to do. If they wanna spin up a machine and run a hash algo all day, just let them. What's the real difference compared to you playing a game? Or watching YouTube? Or whatever you'd like to? They're not forcing us into anything, let them in peace...
- Hasu 5y ago
  > Sure, there are apex predators who are knowingly scamming and defrauding people, but how do I describe a coworker who is enthusiastic about the $1000 of Bitcoin he has? The English language has plenty of words, the ones that come to mind are: rube, mark, or sucker. It's unfortunate, the cryptocurrency and blockchain space is so filled with scams and con artists that at this point, even if a very important and significant use of blockchain appeared, or a viable cryptocurrency emerged, the majority of reasonable people would dismiss it because the space is oversaturated with bullshit. And the true believers are either joining in on the scams or becoming victims, which are ultimately the only two choices once an ecosystem is as overrun as the crypto space is now.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    The only difference between a rube and competent investor in a stock is when they enter and exit the market, and this goes for every stock, nothing is good forever. The only difference between crypto and the stock market is that crypto has less impenetrable jargon, and everyone pretty much knows and excepts that it's all fucking crazy and anything can happen, as opposed to those who've somehow convinced others that they know what the stock market is going to do. At this point, I wouldn't be too sure about saying anything to your coworker about that $1000 of Bitcoin. I saw people make posts like yours (and agreed with them!) When it was at $100, $500, $1k, $5k, $10k, and $20k. At that point it was pretty fucking obvious nobody knows what's going on and nobody has any basis for predicting anything about it long term, so the only rubes are those that have a strong convictions about what it's going to be like a year from now.
anon9001 5y ago
> The whole movement is really good at making you feel dumb for following safe and conservative career advice like "do something practical, save your money, and retire eventually (maybe)". Why sit through yet another technical interview when you could just buy the right stock/cryptocoin? But wait, actually, why sit through yet another technical interview when you could just buy the right stock/cryptocoin? It seems to me that a lot of would-be conservative, career-driven tech workers are discovering that they can make more money flipping jpegs and meme coins than writing code for a big company. Meanwhile, people like us are doing the "real" work of... using machine learning to increase engagement and sell ads for crap people don't need? running A/B tests to see which button configuration causes more UGC? optimizing conversion funnels for ad campaigns? I've come to the sincere belief that the people involved in SHIB or NFTs or any of that are actually contributing more to society than most software engineers that I know. They're trying out new ideas about property ownership and forming new communities around new values. They're doing something of questionable value, but the vast majority of tech workers are doing something of negative value. Regardless of the topic, if your conclusion is that "No, it is the children who are wrong!", chances are you're missing the point.
- animal_spirits 5y ago
  > It seems to me that a lot of would-be conservative, career-driven tech workers are discovering that they can make more money flipping jpegs and meme coins than writing code for a big company. To me it feels like selling snake oil. Things like NFTs do not seem to have any real value except to those who believe it has real value. I do like your take on it that these engineers are exploring new outlets of engineering and that could have some positive externalities kind of like how car enthusiasts in the 50s' were able to build out incredible racing cars and racing series that improved engines quite dramatically
  - kbenson 5y ago
    > Things like NFTs do not seem to have any real value except to those who believe it has real value. So just like any other art, which is one of the things NFTs are being marketed as?

nefitty 5y ago

It reminds me a lot of Terror Management Theory. Sure, there are apex predators who are knowingly scamming and defrauding people, but how do I describe a coworker who is enthusiastic about the $1000 of Bitcoin he has? Even a cursory, technically-minded dig in the garden shows that there's nothing at the center. Smart contracts require oracles. NFTs are addresses that depend on an external interface to make any sense of them. Blockchains are expensive public immutable databases... I tend to filter a lot of these crowd behaviors through the lens of Terror Management Theory. In this case, convincing others that crypto has some true value might not only benefit investors financially, but also reinforce their identity as part of some important movement. I think it's been a tragic waste of economic resources and brain power. Talk about "the smartest people of my generation spend their time figuring out how to make me click ads." If all of this energy had been pointed in the direction of innovating against the direct problem of abundance vs scarcity, it would have avoided becoming a joke. Otherwise, it's just a mimicry of the economic patterns that have dominated the West since its inception, and thus, not revolutionary in the least bit.

rmbyrro 5y ago
I used to think just like that (in general, not this particular topic). Today, it looks to me as a presumptuous way of considering what each person decides to do with they time and lives. One could as easily argue the oxygen you and I are breathing right now is a big waste of resources. Let's just let people do what they want to do. If they wanna spin up a machine and run a hash algo all day, just let them. What's the real difference compared to you playing a game? Or watching YouTube? Or whatever you'd like to? They're not forcing us into anything, let them in peace...
Hasu 5y ago
> Sure, there are apex predators who are knowingly scamming and defrauding people, but how do I describe a coworker who is enthusiastic about the $1000 of Bitcoin he has? The English language has plenty of words, the ones that come to mind are: rube, mark, or sucker. It's unfortunate, the cryptocurrency and blockchain space is so filled with scams and con artists that at this point, even if a very important and significant use of blockchain appeared, or a viable cryptocurrency emerged, the majority of reasonable people would dismiss it because the space is oversaturated with bullshit. And the true believers are either joining in on the scams or becoming victims, which are ultimately the only two choices once an ecosystem is as overrun as the crypto space is now.
- kbenson 5y ago
  The only difference between a rube and competent investor in a stock is when they enter and exit the market, and this goes for every stock, nothing is good forever. The only difference between crypto and the stock market is that crypto has less impenetrable jargon, and everyone pretty much knows and excepts that it's all fucking crazy and anything can happen, as opposed to those who've somehow convinced others that they know what the stock market is going to do. At this point, I wouldn't be too sure about saying anything to your coworker about that $1000 of Bitcoin. I saw people make posts like yours (and agreed with them!) When it was at $100, $500, $1k, $5k, $10k, and $20k. At that point it was pretty fucking obvious nobody knows what's going on and nobody has any basis for predicting anything about it long term, so the only rubes are those that have a strong convictions about what it's going to be like a year from now.

anon9001 5y ago

> The whole movement is really good at making you feel dumb for following safe and conservative career advice like "do something practical, save your money, and retire eventually (maybe)". Why sit through yet another technical interview when you could just buy the right stock/cryptocoin? But wait, actually, why sit through yet another technical interview when you could just buy the right stock/cryptocoin? It seems to me that a lot of would-be conservative, career-driven tech workers are discovering that they can make more money flipping jpegs and meme coins than writing code for a big company. Meanwhile, people like us are doing the "real" work of... using machine learning to increase engagement and sell ads for crap people don't need? running A/B tests to see which button configuration causes more UGC? optimizing conversion funnels for ad campaigns? I've come to the sincere belief that the people involved in SHIB or NFTs or any of that are actually contributing more to society than most software engineers that I know. They're trying out new ideas about property ownership and forming new communities around new values. They're doing something of questionable value, but the vast majority of tech workers are doing something of negative value. Regardless of the topic, if your conclusion is that "No, it is the children who are wrong!", chances are you're missing the point.

animal_spirits 5y ago
> It seems to me that a lot of would-be conservative, career-driven tech workers are discovering that they can make more money flipping jpegs and meme coins than writing code for a big company. To me it feels like selling snake oil. Things like NFTs do not seem to have any real value except to those who believe it has real value. I do like your take on it that these engineers are exploring new outlets of engineering and that could have some positive externalities kind of like how car enthusiasts in the 50s' were able to build out incredible racing cars and racing series that improved engines quite dramatically
- kbenson 5y ago
  > Things like NFTs do not seem to have any real value except to those who believe it has real value. So just like any other art, which is one of the things NFTs are being marketed as?