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I feel like there is a dichotomy amongst developers over crypto / web3 stuff. The HN crowd seems to hold a generally negative view on cyptocurrencies and web3

I feel like there is a dichotomy amongst developers over crypto / web3 stuff. The HN crowd seems to hold a generally negative view on cyptocurrencies and web3 and view it as a bit of scam with no proper use case except to leave someone holding the bag At the same time there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true. Does anybody have any insight as to why this is the case? Is somebody missing something?

searchableguy 5y ago
Opportunity for huge pay out. Unlike web2 startups, web3 startups provide token based ownership. It is more easily liquidated. Vesting periods are shorter for tokens. They have potentially no limit on the ceiling for token valuation while a similar company on public market will depend on fundamentals for its valuation. If you are on a web3 rocketship, the chances of you cashing out is much higher than otherwise similar web2 startup. Similarly, you also have more control over the direction of the company via DAO voting. You can protect your bags from getting diluted.
- jzm2k 5y ago
  I'd say there's also a ton of interesting work to be done, especially on L1: cryptography, distributed storage, peer-to-peer networks etc.
  - danuker 5y ago
    Scaling L1 is a tough-to-impossible proposition. There's just no way to store everyone's transactions on everyone's computers.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      It's not about storing everyones transactions on everyones computers. It's about distributing it to enough computers in order for transactions to be safe and fast. Algorand seems to handle this on L1 just fine.
      - epinephrinios 5y ago
        A lot of alt-L1s claim to scale however they usually sacrifice decentralization which completely degenerates the network to an inefficient database. The challenge of decentralized scaling - https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/vision/ https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/vision/
        capableweb 5y ago
        Are you specifically answering this about Algorand or are you thinking of other platforms? Algorand seems to be sufficiently decentralized, and I wouldn't describe it as "an inefficient database", but I'm happy to be proven wrong if you have evidence of otherwise.
    - x-complexity 5y ago
      > Scaling L1 is a tough-to-impossible proposition. There's just no way to store everyone's transactions on everyone's computers. This is the comment that made me sign up for an account: Thanks for doing that, danuker ;) In the most strictest sense: Yes, it is impossible to store all transactional data on just one computer, just like it would inevitably be impossible for one server/database to host an entire company's data. The conventional way of doing this would be to shard the database so that it could be spread out amongst multiple servers, simple enough. This can't be done directly in a trustless system, however: Additional checks, data structures, & procedures need to be created so that it can be allowed to do so. At a high level overview, data availability sampling [0][1] is required to make the attempt possible. When combined with Verkle trees [2][3] (Merkle trees + zk proofs) however, further improvements towards the number of possible shards could be made, increasing the storage capacity of the entire network even further. [0] https://hackmd.io/@vbuterin/sharding_proposal#:~:text=ELI5%3A%20data%20availability%20sampling https://hackmd.io/@vbuterin/sharding_proposal#:~:text=ELI5%3... [1] https://near.org/papers/nightshade/#state-validity-and-data-availability https://near.org/papers/nightshade/#state-validity-and-data-... [2] https://dankradfeist.de/ethereum/2021/06/18/pcs-multiproofs.html https://dankradfeist.de/ethereum/2021/06/18/pcs-multiproofs.... [3] https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/06/18/verkle.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/06/18/verkle.html
- ausbah 5y ago
  what is the value of the underlying token if not the usefulness of the associated project?
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    The ability to offload it onto retail suckers before the price collapses.
bouk 5y ago
'web3' companies get a lot of funding and are able to pay $250k+ cash. That's it.
- rgallagher27 5y ago
  This. Web3 companies are willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money plus they are willing to pay those high salaries no-matter where you are based. The fully remote salaries I've seen recently for Web3 jobs almost makes me want to make the switch.
  - ackbar03 5y ago
    So you think most of them are purely drawn to the money? You think any of them actually thought "hey there might be something to this" after working on this stuff for some time? Just to be clear I don't really have a side. I'm just curious since I'm not really at the front lines of this stuff
    - hiq 5y ago
      I suspect most of the devs in this space are actually agnostic to this. Enough money for the company to exist for the foreseeable future, big enough compensation, and tech problems abstracted away enough from the end result to be interesting in themselves; all of this can make it quite compelling. Just like you don't have to use Netflix or even enjoy video content to work for them, you don't have to even care about web3 and its future to work in it.
    - mattdesl 5y ago
      you are asking this question in an echo-chamber. :) you’ll find a lot of developers who feel there is plenty of interesting work in blockchains and crypto. one example is zero knowledge research and how it applies to crypto (zk rollups, zkEVM, privacy-preserving attestations and financial proofs, etc). eg: https://0xparc.org/blog https://0xparc.org/blog
    - rgallagher27 5y ago
      I think there's a combination of both. I'm interested by the concept of the blockchain but I'm also apprehensive of the companies/projects that are created on it (for a lot of the reasons outlined in the original post). However offering £150K + sign on bonus is enough for a lot of people (maybe even me) to overlook these issues and jump in for short term gain and the possibility of massive long term gains. If they paid the same as a traditional startup the equation would be different and I think you would see less people making the switch.
kabes 5y ago
For the same reason people work on adTech at facebook. Hint: it's not because they just love advertising.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  Bonus points for those who work at an ad-supported company while using an adblocker themselves. Let he who is without sin throw the first stone.
danuker 5y ago
There are people with different attitudes on different issues. For instance, I believe crypto "dividends" or "yields" are a zero-sum game, diluting the limited savings of have-nots to enrich the haves. For example ETH staking, where to avoid middlemen, you have to stake 32 ETH. But I believe cryptocurrency as an asset is well worth it, for the competition it provides to national currencies. If these decide to overinflate, crypto provides you with a relatively-uninflated asset (though its value also depends to an extent on the liquidity of national currencies, as well as fickle bandwagon effects). Then again, given enough pay, I might consider helping some "entrepreneur" of the zero-sum variety.
- mattdesl 5y ago
  > For example ETH staking, where to avoid middlemen, you have to stake 32 ETH. end goal would be more usage of decentralized staking pools, see Rocket Pool. this way, the ‘middleman’ is a set of smart contracts; the validators (who only require 16ETH) take a slightly higher fee than stakers (who can stake as low as 0.01ETH), for their services rendered (burden of additional maintenance, technical expertise and risk involved with running a validator). But I do feel that centralized staking (CEX, Lido) poses a risk to the network.
- hiq 5y ago
  > But I believe cryptocurrency as an asset is well worth it, for the competition it provides to national currencies. If these decide to overinflate, crypto provides you with a relatively-uninflated asset Given their volatilities, cryptocurrencies are neither inflation hedges nor currencies. Somebody with a bunch of USD trying to hedge inflation will buy gold or real estate before they buy cryptocurrencies.
mkl95 5y ago
It's another gold / oil rush, but this time the "resource" is electricity (actually coal and other stuff being burned). There's a lot of money in crypto at the moment so engineers and VCs will naturally chase it until governments put an end to it (I'm not condoning or opposing it, I'm just saying it will happen).
- lima 5y ago
  None of the innovation in the "Web3 space" relies on proof-of-work. It's all various forms of stake-based consensus now.
  - xchaotic 5y ago
    So? Doesn’t make any less complicated. Kiss
jollybean 5y ago
"a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies" ? Yes, money. This is not a dichotomy. Most people are not ideological and don't care about meta issues. Even those with opinions can be convinced quickly of something else with a huge paycheque. Because Crypto is not directly fraudulent, and you can talk about it superficially as being beneficial, well, people will participate. Money is a great motivator.
davidgerard 5y ago
> there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true. Why would you assume that, though? I've never seen an actual statistic on this. I mean, I'm sure there's greater than zero, but never solid evidence for "a lot". It's to the point where the increasing anecdotes and ongoing absence of any harder numbers leads me to think it's negligible. Back here in the world, crypto on a dev CV is a red flag.
agumonkey 5y ago
For the devs it can be a blend of excitement + ignorance/belief + greed.
fxtentacle 5y ago
Why do people work on weapons of mass destruction, despite the obvious harm that they cause to mostly innocent people? Not everyone cares about the moral high ground. Statistically, about 5% of the population don't. So then web3.0 is extremely high pay + downside you don't care about.
mywaifuismeta 5y ago
> At the same time there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true. Crypto companies are overfunded by VCs and offer amazing packages, more than FAANG in many cases, plus the token upside. Who doesn't want to make a quick buck? Also, it's pretty interesting technology that can be fun to work with. Even if it's useless, it scratches the itch of working on something deeply technical instead of the boring old web technologies.
- antifa 5y ago
  And if you ever get bored of your overpaid crypto job, just pretend to get hacked and walk away with the company's cold wallet.
can16358p 5y ago
I believe many people who hate crypto are the ones that have a good life in a relatively non(or less)-corrupted government-led society, which might be a good reflection of HN demographics. For them, crypto has no value because I think the biggest value proposition is decentralization, which those people don't need as they don't have a corruption problem to solve. They already have a good income, good country and system to live in, etc. Add the many scams going on in the web3 space and it's easy to see why most people don't like it. As a developer who started to turn into crypto recently: I live in a corrupted country with a corrupted government that has too much power and has no good intentions for its people. I can easily get crypto tokens or some other form of compensation for doing some work for a crypto company, which usually pays much better than regular work, while exploring new ways of thinking about how money and economy works in the first place. As a developer I feel enthusiastic about everything crypto can offer, and learning more about Solidity development and inter-chain communications and new scalable layers just excite me even more. There is not a single reason for me to not love crypto. It's all about demographics.
- shafyy 5y ago
  You're very naive if you think that corrupt governments won't have power over blockchain-based technologies.
  - koonsolo 5y ago
    You're very naive to think that any authority can have power over distributed technology. BitTorrent is 20 years old, and today you can still download any movie you want from it. Why hasn't any company or government being able to stop it?
    - mijamo 5y ago
      It has largely stopped being common though. The supply has also gone down drastically. It used to be easy to find even confidential movies and download them, even for a non tech family. Nowadays only well informed people keep pirating and non-mainstream supply has gone down so much that it is sometimes impossible to find, which is a shame because that supply is also frequently not available through streaming so you just have some DVD on Amazon. The crackdown on pirating + streaming together really killed the scene at a point where it's no longer an inconvenience for the market actors. I would say the same is happening with crypto where KYC and AML rules will progressively apply so that you will still have crypto but the "freedom" or lawless use will be so inconvenient that it won't be a problem for governments and financial actors. It just take time for those rules to be set, but there's really not so many complicated things about it. The belief that code would beat laws is absurd, in the end you live in a physical world. Sure you could try to have an underground crypto that nobody can use officially but would that really be useful?
IanCal 5y ago
The negative sides are very loud, making HN a place that isn't very nice to talk about technical details. You only see the comments people post. HN, like most places, mostly doesn't have a very good understanding of the underlying technology and enjoys the pithy hot takes. "An NFT is just _bad analogy_" is everywhere, and other complaints often read like "Rails? People make blogs with that and I saw a load of blogs filled with spam, I don't like rails". > At the same time there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true. People build plenty of things for companies without necessarily being wide eyed believers in some honourable quest. For me, there are a few key things 1. Obviously pay. My family are the most important thing here, and people pay me money to write code & solve problems for them. Money can be exchanged for goods and services. 2. It's an interesting space. You've got a global database with row level security for modifications and stored procedures. Everyone uses key based security. On top, the database is slow, those stored procedures have very strict limits and computations need to be heavily optimised. Everything is public. There are now multiple linked databases with different tradeoffs. How do you mix those? How do you ensure safety, security, validity? How do you do off-chain computation and get the results back on chain? 3. It's new. Do you know what happens if I come up with a great new technical idea in most development? It's either a bad idea for reasons others have discovered already or someone has already implemented it better than I could. It often requires very deep expertise to do something truly new. On the crypto side, I've come up with things that are (as far as I can tell) brand new. I find building to be more fun than configuring, and you need to build new things in this space. 4. It's changing fast. There are things you can do now you couldn't do 6 months ago, a year ago, two years ago. The space is very active. I don't know if it'll be the foundation of everything in 10 years, a distant memory of "oh yeah people tried that didn't they" or if I'll be like COBOL programmers fixing legacy weird systems from an ill fated project. All I know is it's _fun_ and _hard_ and people pay me to do it. For a community that builds so many things just to see if they can, I find it quite surprising that so many coders aren't even curious.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  HN has hated Bitcoin since before there was any reason to hate it. In the very early days there was a positive attitude. However, since the price started to reach double digits, the attitude became sharply negative and that has stuck for the last 10 years. Some HN thought leaders declared Bitcoin a tulip bubble when the price was 1000x smaller than it is now. There are legitimate criticisms of cryptocurrency but the attitude here is more of a hardened loathing punctuated with a minority of more open minded people.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Couldn't you replace crypto with "advertising-funded walled gardens that promote addictive rage and conspiracy theories while passing all your details onto oppressive governments" and describe the last decade in the same way? They were also going to change the world (I'm not sure if they specified for the better).
genge 5y ago
There are legit projects. There are many bad projects. HN people generalize and the ones that know the legit projects understand discussing is a waste of time.
divs1210 5y ago
I wonder if the nocoiners here are aware that YCombinator is incubating a lot of crypto startups. Coinbase is a YCombinator company.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  That's nocoalers, not nocoiners. Bitcoin is China's way of exporting coal through the atmosphere. Proof of Waste is what PoW really stands for, and Proof of Stake has always been a pipe dream that's never been delivered, and it has its own terrible problems, like being Oligarchy on Steroids.
  - divs1210 5y ago
    Source?
    - divs1210 4y ago
      To everyone who keeps repeating the same energy-related arguments against BTC, I want you to read this: https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html
ilaksh 5y ago
I have learned that the more I mention cryptocurrency or even decentralized anything the more likely my comment is to be buried. So I would say cryptocurrency enthusiasts are sort of suppressing themselves. I have been running a business with payments in micro transactions on Algorand for a few months. It's not something that would be remotely possible without cryptocurrency. It's true that there are a lot of scams and nonsense, but I know for a fact that there are real artists using smart contracts to sell their art frictionlessly and engage with their community in ways that are again, impossible without this technology. But to go back to the original point, writing this kind of thing on HN, there is a real chance the comment will be downvoted quite a lot.
Kaze404 5y ago
I don't feel like those two sentences pose a dichotomy. In the same way that I think Amazon is hell on earth but would very likely work for them simply because working in a capitalist system means you'll always be contributing to harm somewhere, the only difference is in intensity or directness. From my perspective someone can think crypto is a net loss to society and still work on a company that uses it for a multitude of reasons, with circumstance being one of them.
conjectures 5y ago
HN has its own groupthink. For crypto it's that it's all coal powered shiba shitcoins. There was likely a similar group of people bitching in 1999. The dotcom bubble did happen, and yet dot coms also happened. The point is that to see the upside, you need to evaluate what new capabilities the tech offers, whether they're interesting, and who is doing the real work (if it exists).
throwawaysodev 5y ago
> At the same time there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true. I'm interviewing right now at a large-ish cryptocurrency company. I'm currently an exhausted L6 at a FAANG. The promise of fewer working hours and no on-call rota is very attractive to me, as well as the ability to start with Go f/time[1] on mostly greenfield[2] projects. [1] Team I am on has agreed long before I joined to use nothing but Java. [2] I'm also tired, after decades in the industry, of mostly maintaining existing products. The chance to create new stuff from scratch is very attractive.

searchableguy 5y ago

Opportunity for huge pay out. Unlike web2 startups, web3 startups provide token based ownership. It is more easily liquidated. Vesting periods are shorter for tokens. They have potentially no limit on the ceiling for token valuation while a similar company on public market will depend on fundamentals for its valuation. If you are on a web3 rocketship, the chances of you cashing out is much higher than otherwise similar web2 startup. Similarly, you also have more control over the direction of the company via DAO voting. You can protect your bags from getting diluted.

jzm2k 5y ago
I'd say there's also a ton of interesting work to be done, especially on L1: cryptography, distributed storage, peer-to-peer networks etc.
- danuker 5y ago
  Scaling L1 is a tough-to-impossible proposition. There's just no way to store everyone's transactions on everyone's computers.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    It's not about storing everyones transactions on everyones computers. It's about distributing it to enough computers in order for transactions to be safe and fast. Algorand seems to handle this on L1 just fine.
    - epinephrinios 5y ago
      A lot of alt-L1s claim to scale however they usually sacrifice decentralization which completely degenerates the network to an inefficient database. The challenge of decentralized scaling - https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/vision/ https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/vision/
      - capableweb 5y ago
        Are you specifically answering this about Algorand or are you thinking of other platforms? Algorand seems to be sufficiently decentralized, and I wouldn't describe it as "an inefficient database", but I'm happy to be proven wrong if you have evidence of otherwise.
  - x-complexity 5y ago
    > Scaling L1 is a tough-to-impossible proposition. There's just no way to store everyone's transactions on everyone's computers. This is the comment that made me sign up for an account: Thanks for doing that, danuker ;) In the most strictest sense: Yes, it is impossible to store all transactional data on just one computer, just like it would inevitably be impossible for one server/database to host an entire company's data. The conventional way of doing this would be to shard the database so that it could be spread out amongst multiple servers, simple enough. This can't be done directly in a trustless system, however: Additional checks, data structures, & procedures need to be created so that it can be allowed to do so. At a high level overview, data availability sampling [0][1] is required to make the attempt possible. When combined with Verkle trees [2][3] (Merkle trees + zk proofs) however, further improvements towards the number of possible shards could be made, increasing the storage capacity of the entire network even further. [0] https://hackmd.io/@vbuterin/sharding_proposal#:~:text=ELI5%3A%20data%20availability%20sampling https://hackmd.io/@vbuterin/sharding_proposal#:~:text=ELI5%3... [1] https://near.org/papers/nightshade/#state-validity-and-data-availability https://near.org/papers/nightshade/#state-validity-and-data-... [2] https://dankradfeist.de/ethereum/2021/06/18/pcs-multiproofs.html https://dankradfeist.de/ethereum/2021/06/18/pcs-multiproofs.... [3] https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/06/18/verkle.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/06/18/verkle.html
ausbah 5y ago
what is the value of the underlying token if not the usefulness of the associated project?
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  The ability to offload it onto retail suckers before the price collapses.

bouk 5y ago

'web3' companies get a lot of funding and are able to pay $250k+ cash. That's it.

rgallagher27 5y ago
This. Web3 companies are willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money plus they are willing to pay those high salaries no-matter where you are based. The fully remote salaries I've seen recently for Web3 jobs almost makes me want to make the switch.
- ackbar03 5y ago
  So you think most of them are purely drawn to the money? You think any of them actually thought "hey there might be something to this" after working on this stuff for some time? Just to be clear I don't really have a side. I'm just curious since I'm not really at the front lines of this stuff
  - hiq 5y ago
    I suspect most of the devs in this space are actually agnostic to this. Enough money for the company to exist for the foreseeable future, big enough compensation, and tech problems abstracted away enough from the end result to be interesting in themselves; all of this can make it quite compelling. Just like you don't have to use Netflix or even enjoy video content to work for them, you don't have to even care about web3 and its future to work in it.
  - mattdesl 5y ago
    you are asking this question in an echo-chamber. :) you’ll find a lot of developers who feel there is plenty of interesting work in blockchains and crypto. one example is zero knowledge research and how it applies to crypto (zk rollups, zkEVM, privacy-preserving attestations and financial proofs, etc). eg: https://0xparc.org/blog https://0xparc.org/blog
  - rgallagher27 5y ago
    I think there's a combination of both. I'm interested by the concept of the blockchain but I'm also apprehensive of the companies/projects that are created on it (for a lot of the reasons outlined in the original post). However offering £150K + sign on bonus is enough for a lot of people (maybe even me) to overlook these issues and jump in for short term gain and the possibility of massive long term gains. If they paid the same as a traditional startup the equation would be different and I think you would see less people making the switch.

kabes 5y ago

For the same reason people work on adTech at facebook. Hint: it's not because they just love advertising.

zarzavat 5y ago
Bonus points for those who work at an ad-supported company while using an adblocker themselves. Let he who is without sin throw the first stone.

danuker 5y ago

There are people with different attitudes on different issues. For instance, I believe crypto "dividends" or "yields" are a zero-sum game, diluting the limited savings of have-nots to enrich the haves. For example ETH staking, where to avoid middlemen, you have to stake 32 ETH. But I believe cryptocurrency as an asset is well worth it, for the competition it provides to national currencies. If these decide to overinflate, crypto provides you with a relatively-uninflated asset (though its value also depends to an extent on the liquidity of national currencies, as well as fickle bandwagon effects). Then again, given enough pay, I might consider helping some "entrepreneur" of the zero-sum variety.

mattdesl 5y ago
> For example ETH staking, where to avoid middlemen, you have to stake 32 ETH. end goal would be more usage of decentralized staking pools, see Rocket Pool. this way, the ‘middleman’ is a set of smart contracts; the validators (who only require 16ETH) take a slightly higher fee than stakers (who can stake as low as 0.01ETH), for their services rendered (burden of additional maintenance, technical expertise and risk involved with running a validator). But I do feel that centralized staking (CEX, Lido) poses a risk to the network.
hiq 5y ago
> But I believe cryptocurrency as an asset is well worth it, for the competition it provides to national currencies. If these decide to overinflate, crypto provides you with a relatively-uninflated asset Given their volatilities, cryptocurrencies are neither inflation hedges nor currencies. Somebody with a bunch of USD trying to hedge inflation will buy gold or real estate before they buy cryptocurrencies.

mkl95 5y ago

It's another gold / oil rush, but this time the "resource" is electricity (actually coal and other stuff being burned). There's a lot of money in crypto at the moment so engineers and VCs will naturally chase it until governments put an end to it (I'm not condoning or opposing it, I'm just saying it will happen).

lima 5y ago
None of the innovation in the "Web3 space" relies on proof-of-work. It's all various forms of stake-based consensus now.
- xchaotic 5y ago
  So? Doesn’t make any less complicated. Kiss

jollybean 5y ago

"a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies" ? Yes, money. This is not a dichotomy. Most people are not ideological and don't care about meta issues. Even those with opinions can be convinced quickly of something else with a huge paycheque. Because Crypto is not directly fraudulent, and you can talk about it superficially as being beneficial, well, people will participate. Money is a great motivator.

davidgerard 5y ago

> there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true. Why would you assume that, though? I've never seen an actual statistic on this. I mean, I'm sure there's greater than zero, but never solid evidence for "a lot". It's to the point where the increasing anecdotes and ongoing absence of any harder numbers leads me to think it's negligible. Back here in the world, crypto on a dev CV is a red flag.

agumonkey 5y ago

For the devs it can be a blend of excitement + ignorance/belief + greed.

fxtentacle 5y ago

Why do people work on weapons of mass destruction, despite the obvious harm that they cause to mostly innocent people? Not everyone cares about the moral high ground. Statistically, about 5% of the population don't. So then web3.0 is extremely high pay + downside you don't care about.

mywaifuismeta 5y ago

> At the same time there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true. Crypto companies are overfunded by VCs and offer amazing packages, more than FAANG in many cases, plus the token upside. Who doesn't want to make a quick buck? Also, it's pretty interesting technology that can be fun to work with. Even if it's useless, it scratches the itch of working on something deeply technical instead of the boring old web technologies.

antifa 5y ago
And if you ever get bored of your overpaid crypto job, just pretend to get hacked and walk away with the company's cold wallet.

can16358p 5y ago

I believe many people who hate crypto are the ones that have a good life in a relatively non(or less)-corrupted government-led society, which might be a good reflection of HN demographics. For them, crypto has no value because I think the biggest value proposition is decentralization, which those people don't need as they don't have a corruption problem to solve. They already have a good income, good country and system to live in, etc. Add the many scams going on in the web3 space and it's easy to see why most people don't like it. As a developer who started to turn into crypto recently: I live in a corrupted country with a corrupted government that has too much power and has no good intentions for its people. I can easily get crypto tokens or some other form of compensation for doing some work for a crypto company, which usually pays much better than regular work, while exploring new ways of thinking about how money and economy works in the first place. As a developer I feel enthusiastic about everything crypto can offer, and learning more about Solidity development and inter-chain communications and new scalable layers just excite me even more. There is not a single reason for me to not love crypto. It's all about demographics.

shafyy 5y ago
You're very naive if you think that corrupt governments won't have power over blockchain-based technologies.
- koonsolo 5y ago
  You're very naive to think that any authority can have power over distributed technology. BitTorrent is 20 years old, and today you can still download any movie you want from it. Why hasn't any company or government being able to stop it?
  - mijamo 5y ago
    It has largely stopped being common though. The supply has also gone down drastically. It used to be easy to find even confidential movies and download them, even for a non tech family. Nowadays only well informed people keep pirating and non-mainstream supply has gone down so much that it is sometimes impossible to find, which is a shame because that supply is also frequently not available through streaming so you just have some DVD on Amazon. The crackdown on pirating + streaming together really killed the scene at a point where it's no longer an inconvenience for the market actors. I would say the same is happening with crypto where KYC and AML rules will progressively apply so that you will still have crypto but the "freedom" or lawless use will be so inconvenient that it won't be a problem for governments and financial actors. It just take time for those rules to be set, but there's really not so many complicated things about it. The belief that code would beat laws is absurd, in the end you live in a physical world. Sure you could try to have an underground crypto that nobody can use officially but would that really be useful?

IanCal 5y ago

The negative sides are very loud, making HN a place that isn't very nice to talk about technical details. You only see the comments people post. HN, like most places, mostly doesn't have a very good understanding of the underlying technology and enjoys the pithy hot takes. "An NFT is just _bad analogy_" is everywhere, and other complaints often read like "Rails? People make blogs with that and I saw a load of blogs filled with spam, I don't like rails". > At the same time there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true. People build plenty of things for companies without necessarily being wide eyed believers in some honourable quest. For me, there are a few key things 1. Obviously pay. My family are the most important thing here, and people pay me money to write code & solve problems for them. Money can be exchanged for goods and services. 2. It's an interesting space. You've got a global database with row level security for modifications and stored procedures. Everyone uses key based security. On top, the database is slow, those stored procedures have very strict limits and computations need to be heavily optimised. Everything is public. There are now multiple linked databases with different tradeoffs. How do you mix those? How do you ensure safety, security, validity? How do you do off-chain computation and get the results back on chain? 3. It's new. Do you know what happens if I come up with a great new technical idea in most development? It's either a bad idea for reasons others have discovered already or someone has already implemented it better than I could. It often requires very deep expertise to do something truly new. On the crypto side, I've come up with things that are (as far as I can tell) brand new. I find building to be more fun than configuring, and you need to build new things in this space. 4. It's changing fast. There are things you can do now you couldn't do 6 months ago, a year ago, two years ago. The space is very active. I don't know if it'll be the foundation of everything in 10 years, a distant memory of "oh yeah people tried that didn't they" or if I'll be like COBOL programmers fixing legacy weird systems from an ill fated project. All I know is it's _fun_ and _hard_ and people pay me to do it. For a community that builds so many things just to see if they can, I find it quite surprising that so many coders aren't even curious.

zarzavat 5y ago
HN has hated Bitcoin since before there was any reason to hate it. In the very early days there was a positive attitude. However, since the price started to reach double digits, the attitude became sharply negative and that has stuck for the last 10 years. Some HN thought leaders declared Bitcoin a tulip bubble when the price was 1000x smaller than it is now. There are legitimate criticisms of cryptocurrency but the attitude here is more of a hardened loathing punctuated with a minority of more open minded people.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

Couldn't you replace crypto with "advertising-funded walled gardens that promote addictive rage and conspiracy theories while passing all your details onto oppressive governments" and describe the last decade in the same way? They were also going to change the world (I'm not sure if they specified for the better).

genge 5y ago

There are legit projects. There are many bad projects. HN people generalize and the ones that know the legit projects understand discussing is a waste of time.

divs1210 5y ago

I wonder if the nocoiners here are aware that YCombinator is incubating a lot of crypto startups. Coinbase is a YCombinator company.

DonHopkins 5y ago
That's nocoalers, not nocoiners. Bitcoin is China's way of exporting coal through the atmosphere. Proof of Waste is what PoW really stands for, and Proof of Stake has always been a pipe dream that's never been delivered, and it has its own terrible problems, like being Oligarchy on Steroids.
- divs1210 5y ago
  Source?
  - divs1210 4y ago
    To everyone who keeps repeating the same energy-related arguments against BTC, I want you to read this: https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html

ilaksh 5y ago

I have learned that the more I mention cryptocurrency or even decentralized anything the more likely my comment is to be buried. So I would say cryptocurrency enthusiasts are sort of suppressing themselves. I have been running a business with payments in micro transactions on Algorand for a few months. It's not something that would be remotely possible without cryptocurrency. It's true that there are a lot of scams and nonsense, but I know for a fact that there are real artists using smart contracts to sell their art frictionlessly and engage with their community in ways that are again, impossible without this technology. But to go back to the original point, writing this kind of thing on HN, there is a real chance the comment will be downvoted quite a lot.

Kaze404 5y ago

I don't feel like those two sentences pose a dichotomy. In the same way that I think Amazon is hell on earth but would very likely work for them simply because working in a capitalist system means you'll always be contributing to harm somewhere, the only difference is in intensity or directness. From my perspective someone can think crypto is a net loss to society and still work on a company that uses it for a multitude of reasons, with circumstance being one of them.

conjectures 5y ago

HN has its own groupthink. For crypto it's that it's all coal powered shiba shitcoins. There was likely a similar group of people bitching in 1999. The dotcom bubble did happen, and yet dot coms also happened. The point is that to see the upside, you need to evaluate what new capabilities the tech offers, whether they're interesting, and who is doing the real work (if it exists).

throwawaysodev 5y ago

> At the same time there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true. I'm interviewing right now at a large-ish cryptocurrency company. I'm currently an exhausted L6 at a FAANG. The promise of fewer working hours and no on-call rota is very attractive to me, as well as the ability to start with Go f/time[1] on mostly greenfield[2] projects. [1] Team I am on has agreed long before I joined to use nothing but Java. [2] I'm also tired, after decades in the industry, of mostly maintaining existing products. The chance to create new stuff from scratch is very attractive.