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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 so

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
        > Why is cryptocurrency software development different, to you, then the rest of tech? In the rest of the software industry, there is at least a plausible resemblance to traditional economic incentives: you build software that people pay for (or otherwise extracts value from them, like adtech). The "value" of the product, company, &c. is some function of the company's financial health, public speculation, and the expected size of the market. It's difficult to say the same for DeFi: nearly all of the products seem to be in the "Uber for Dogs" category, except that the "Uber" is an extremely slow distributed ledger with no discernible benefits. The value appears to be solely in speculation, divorced from underlying technical value. And here's the thing: the market can speculate all it wants. But the underlying economic reality is that cryptocurrencies aren't meaningfully competing with traditional alternatives, and the market is built on that: we see ridiculous valuations for "$SERVICE but on $COIN" not because `$SERVICE` is worth that much, but because speculators are riding the speculative wave of `$COIN` and using `$SERVICE` to pump that speculation.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
pavlov 5y ago
> Token grants worth a million dollars or more, vest in 3-6 months as opposed to 1-4 years […] Its much more de-risked than equity in the rest of tech Getting paid in unregistered securities that I have to dump on some shady foreign exchange isn’t my definition of “derisked”. People accepting this kind of payment for their services are hoping to cash out before the bubble pops and develop selective amnesia about their role in scamming retail investors with these boiler room tokens.
- dannyw 5y ago
  1. All private startup equity is unregistered. 2. Money talks.
  - pavlov 5y ago
    > All private startup equity is unregistered. Yes it is, and I’m not trying to profit by illegally selling it to retail investors. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems like a dangerous assumption that the SEC won’t care that you sold a million dollars’ worth of tokens that represent equity in your employer and were granted to you on that basis.
    - vmception 5y ago
      Selling tokens from employment is much more like selling a bunch of SUPREME merchandise you were granted at one price which retail will pay a premium for. Tokens just make that a practical thing to offer to employee given the high market liquidity, compared to consumer products. The technology allows for overlapping feature of equity securities, but they dont have to be implemented. Sometimes the SEC sees overlapping securities laws involved, and then they do care, but its really just a problem for consumer protection agencies like the FTC, who doesn't care to regulate transactions. So securities purview is not inherent to the format of asset being exchanged, so there are some things to avoid and then you’re good to go.
- vmception 5y ago
  Onchain automated market making (AMM) systems have changed that for the last two years. Its derisked because the shady foreign exchanges are removed from the equation, and the gamble for exit liquidity is removed from the idea of exchanges balking at SEC actions. We are at the point now where liquidity doesn't disappear even if the SEC pokes at the project. Due to the nature of AMMs, liquidity can be automatically provided and locked on-chain and even burned - ensuring its availability permanently at some prices, so nobody could even compel an entity to take down liquidity, I’ve never seen a system like that before. This is an example of antifragility, and antifragility has value. This kind of systems increases its capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. Its an example of what people have been trying to say for a whole decade now. Derisked doesnt mean absolved of risk. It means some of the risk is removed. So, it also means it doesnt matter! Employees have no liability, only money, they don't even put up capital. Its the same circumstance as hopeful employees being convinced they're “changing the world” at tech startups and publicly traded tech companies, except more favorable for employees.
pcthrowaway 5y ago
There are a lot of people working on PoW and PoS still. See NIPoPoWs (https://nipopows.com/ https://nipopows.com/) or the competing PoS models that do things differently (Ouroboros, Tendermint, Lachesis)
- vmception 5y ago
  I definitely find that part of the stack interesting I really find that todays trendy “muh energy use” detractors will wind up contributing to alternate consensus models for distributed ledgers Which means its still more beneficial to have prior experience in this sector than simply hoping it goes away

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
      > Why is cryptocurrency software development different, to you, then the rest of tech? In the rest of the software industry, there is at least a plausible resemblance to traditional economic incentives: you build software that people pay for (or otherwise extracts value from them, like adtech). The "value" of the product, company, &c. is some function of the company's financial health, public speculation, and the expected size of the market. It's difficult to say the same for DeFi: nearly all of the products seem to be in the "Uber for Dogs" category, except that the "Uber" is an extremely slow distributed ledger with no discernible benefits. The value appears to be solely in speculation, divorced from underlying technical value. And here's the thing: the market can speculate all it wants. But the underlying economic reality is that cryptocurrencies aren't meaningfully competing with traditional alternatives, and the market is built on that: we see ridiculous valuations for "$SERVICE but on $COIN" not because `$SERVICE` is worth that much, but because speculators are riding the speculative wave of `$COIN` and using `$SERVICE` to pump that speculation.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]

pavlov 5y ago

> Token grants worth a million dollars or more, vest in 3-6 months as opposed to 1-4 years […] Its much more de-risked than equity in the rest of tech Getting paid in unregistered securities that I have to dump on some shady foreign exchange isn’t my definition of “derisked”. People accepting this kind of payment for their services are hoping to cash out before the bubble pops and develop selective amnesia about their role in scamming retail investors with these boiler room tokens.

dannyw 5y ago
1. All private startup equity is unregistered. 2. Money talks.
- pavlov 5y ago
  > All private startup equity is unregistered. Yes it is, and I’m not trying to profit by illegally selling it to retail investors. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems like a dangerous assumption that the SEC won’t care that you sold a million dollars’ worth of tokens that represent equity in your employer and were granted to you on that basis.
  - vmception 5y ago
    Selling tokens from employment is much more like selling a bunch of SUPREME merchandise you were granted at one price which retail will pay a premium for. Tokens just make that a practical thing to offer to employee given the high market liquidity, compared to consumer products. The technology allows for overlapping feature of equity securities, but they dont have to be implemented. Sometimes the SEC sees overlapping securities laws involved, and then they do care, but its really just a problem for consumer protection agencies like the FTC, who doesn't care to regulate transactions. So securities purview is not inherent to the format of asset being exchanged, so there are some things to avoid and then you’re good to go.
vmception 5y ago
Onchain automated market making (AMM) systems have changed that for the last two years. Its derisked because the shady foreign exchanges are removed from the equation, and the gamble for exit liquidity is removed from the idea of exchanges balking at SEC actions. We are at the point now where liquidity doesn't disappear even if the SEC pokes at the project. Due to the nature of AMMs, liquidity can be automatically provided and locked on-chain and even burned - ensuring its availability permanently at some prices, so nobody could even compel an entity to take down liquidity, I’ve never seen a system like that before. This is an example of antifragility, and antifragility has value. This kind of systems increases its capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. Its an example of what people have been trying to say for a whole decade now. Derisked doesnt mean absolved of risk. It means some of the risk is removed. So, it also means it doesnt matter! Employees have no liability, only money, they don't even put up capital. Its the same circumstance as hopeful employees being convinced they're “changing the world” at tech startups and publicly traded tech companies, except more favorable for employees.

pcthrowaway 5y ago

There are a lot of people working on PoW and PoS still. See NIPoPoWs (https://nipopows.com/ https://nipopows.com/) or the competing PoS models that do things differently (Ouroboros, Tendermint, Lachesis)

vmception 5y ago
I definitely find that part of the stack interesting I really find that todays trendy “muh energy use” detractors will wind up contributing to alternate consensus models for distributed ledgers Which means its still more beneficial to have prior experience in this sector than simply hoping it goes away