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These are good points, there is a lot more going on than the consensus models, even if they are inseparable. Most cryptocurrency developers are not working on t

These are good points, there is a lot more going on than the consensus models, even if they are inseparable. Most cryptocurrency developers are not working on that, and are not working on mining. Some are, and some of those are working to improve these issues. The only approach to the grandparent poster’s “nemesis” all leads to contributing to the cryptocurrency ecosystem, as you can only improve some parts of the stack, as opposed to hoping the stack disappears. And a high probability of making a lot of money in the process.

woodruffw 5y ago
> Most cryptocurrency developers are not working on that, and are not working on mining. Some are, and some of those are working to improve these issues. It would be interesting to see numbers backing this up, as well as the claim that cryptocurrency developers are making more than SWEs on average. Anecdotally, my friends and acquaintances (numbering a ~dozen or so) at cryptocurrencies are split about evenly between PoW and PoS. Nobody I know is working on alternatives, and this is consistent with the economic incentives: the money is all in PoW, and the engineers go where the money is.
- vmception 5y ago
  Its a stack. That part is done, so you dont work on that, you work on things at a higher part of the stack: wallets, standards, libraries, node communication software, applications, employee at a startup doing applications…Nothing to prove there, just a fundamental understanding. Maybe a tech recruiter can help you with numbers? This is like one of those studies where people are thinking “academics really spent time and resources to make a study on this topic?” when its true that someone in an obscure forum asked “source?” and there simply needed to be a source to point to eventually. Crypto Tech recruiters will give you some insight into what people are making. People that opt for employment are getting like $150k-$250k and token grants that can easily be worth a million dollars or more, vest in 3-6 months as opposed to 1-4 years. People that opt for self employment negotiate much larger percentages of the tokens or sales of tokens, and so it can be a lot more. There are many duds, and that doesn’t matter unless a separate higher standard was levied exclusively to crypto (which is common, and silly). Its much more de-risked than equity in the rest of tech. It competes with FAANG and surpasses for almost everyone that bothers to show up. If you can code. In any case, there are a few people looking for and developing consensus-level alternatives. But proof of work and proof of stake is very simple and so a developer wouldn't be working on that finished aspect. They would be working on an alternative, or not at the consensus layer.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    I think you've misunderstood or are misinterpreting: I'm not claiming that the majority of people are working on the "proof" aspect of PoW or PoS. Those are, indeed, mostly settled. The anecdotal claim is that all of the components up the "stack" are focused primarily on chains/substrates/ecosystems/whatever-you-want-to-call-thems that ultimately boil down to just PoS or PoW. Nobody is laboring under the delusion that their NIH cryptocurrency wallet is worth anything in any other context.
    - vmception 5y ago
      Okay, its a stack. Everything at a higher layer is dependent on the lower consensus layer. Not sure what answer you want or are willing to accept if you don’t want to separate those things. Many frontend only developers just plug in a library so that their client side users communicate to the nearest node and then make 6-7 figures or more. Thats so far abstracted away from consensus layer that I dont know what to say. Edit: I guess the most important thing to say is that the frontend developer’s code would still work even if the consensus model was swapped to something else, or was an actual centralized database. I mean, they do test on localhost.
      - woodruffw 5y ago
        The two claims here ("it's an abstracted stack" and "DeFi engineers are collecting 6-7 figures") are fundamentally at odds: the latter can only be true if the economic (un?)reality of hype around PoW and PoS tokens can sufficiently goad investors/grifters/whoever into dumping money onto ideas that they would scoff at in a conventional setting.
        vmception 5y ago
        The same goes for someone caring about TCP vs UDP, or perhaps a more fundamentally competing standard back then which doesnt exist now. If the software developer is not working on that, they're not working on it. The backbone layer functioning still has to provide confidence to investors so the developer can sell their app. Why is cryptocurrency software development different, to you, then the rest of tech?

woodruffw 5y ago

> Most cryptocurrency developers are not working on that, and are not working on mining. Some are, and some of those are working to improve these issues. It would be interesting to see numbers backing this up, as well as the claim that cryptocurrency developers are making more than SWEs on average. Anecdotally, my friends and acquaintances (numbering a ~dozen or so) at cryptocurrencies are split about evenly between PoW and PoS. Nobody I know is working on alternatives, and this is consistent with the economic incentives: the money is all in PoW, and the engineers go where the money is.

vmception 5y ago
Its a stack. That part is done, so you dont work on that, you work on things at a higher part of the stack: wallets, standards, libraries, node communication software, applications, employee at a startup doing applications…Nothing to prove there, just a fundamental understanding. Maybe a tech recruiter can help you with numbers? This is like one of those studies where people are thinking “academics really spent time and resources to make a study on this topic?” when its true that someone in an obscure forum asked “source?” and there simply needed to be a source to point to eventually. Crypto Tech recruiters will give you some insight into what people are making. People that opt for employment are getting like $150k-$250k and token grants that can easily be worth a million dollars or more, vest in 3-6 months as opposed to 1-4 years. People that opt for self employment negotiate much larger percentages of the tokens or sales of tokens, and so it can be a lot more. There are many duds, and that doesn’t matter unless a separate higher standard was levied exclusively to crypto (which is common, and silly). Its much more de-risked than equity in the rest of tech. It competes with FAANG and surpasses for almost everyone that bothers to show up. If you can code. In any case, there are a few people looking for and developing consensus-level alternatives. But proof of work and proof of stake is very simple and so a developer wouldn't be working on that finished aspect. They would be working on an alternative, or not at the consensus layer.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  I think you've misunderstood or are misinterpreting: I'm not claiming that the majority of people are working on the "proof" aspect of PoW or PoS. Those are, indeed, mostly settled. The anecdotal claim is that all of the components up the "stack" are focused primarily on chains/substrates/ecosystems/whatever-you-want-to-call-thems that ultimately boil down to just PoS or PoW. Nobody is laboring under the delusion that their NIH cryptocurrency wallet is worth anything in any other context.
  - vmception 5y ago
    Okay, its a stack. Everything at a higher layer is dependent on the lower consensus layer. Not sure what answer you want or are willing to accept if you don’t want to separate those things. Many frontend only developers just plug in a library so that their client side users communicate to the nearest node and then make 6-7 figures or more. Thats so far abstracted away from consensus layer that I dont know what to say. Edit: I guess the most important thing to say is that the frontend developer’s code would still work even if the consensus model was swapped to something else, or was an actual centralized database. I mean, they do test on localhost.
    - woodruffw 5y ago
      The two claims here ("it's an abstracted stack" and "DeFi engineers are collecting 6-7 figures") are fundamentally at odds: the latter can only be true if the economic (un?)reality of hype around PoW and PoS tokens can sufficiently goad investors/grifters/whoever into dumping money onto ideas that they would scoff at in a conventional setting.
      - vmception 5y ago
        The same goes for someone caring about TCP vs UDP, or perhaps a more fundamentally competing standard back then which doesnt exist now. If the software developer is not working on that, they're not working on it. The backbone layer functioning still has to provide confidence to investors so the developer can sell their app. Why is cryptocurrency software development different, to you, then the rest of tech?