7 ms·

For the first time my anger over crypto moves into genuine concern. Is an entire generation of young people experiencing a kind of "pokemonisation" of crypto w

For the first time my anger over crypto moves into genuine concern. Is an entire generation of young people experiencing a kind of "pokemonisation" of crypto well into early adulthood? In other words, is a generation of 20-somethings wasting the better part of that decade on this tech, in these scams? If so, this feels new (?). We're not talking about the chain-letter crazes of the 20s/30s, the housewife pyramid schemes of the 60/70s, the ponzi schemes of traditional finance. We're talking about a "pyrimidization" of technical skill acquisition itself, wherein we dont teach classical mechanics -- that's too "physics2" -- but crypto-mechanics which solves no problems of the prior, and charges. If this is happening the issues around crypto are perhaps much more severe than I, at least, initially thought. Yes, $100bn will be lost in a vareity of scams deposited, in the end, into the accounts of charlatans, children and gurus. BUT, meh, so it goes. But a cultural take-over of the technical skill space by a crypto religion is far more series and needs addressing ASAP. Someone needs to explain to the developing generation that this isnt the future.

k__ 4y ago
When I graduated, mobile was the big thing. That's old now. So, what to do to make a name for you? What big new field is there where you don't have to compete with people that have 10 times the experience than you? Independently of what you think web3 might solve or doesn't solve, it's still just programming. Someone learning cryptography and coding will get a job in other places.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  That's a hopeful upside, that, say an 18 is learning data technology, programming etc. via crypto. My concern is whether that's what they are learning; too early to tell, of course. One thing I'm also thinking is that crypto functions like "wokeism" in the sense it seems a parallel right-wing version of the same kind of cultural reformation. At the same time large retail biz profess their diversity credentials, their heads of research explain how crypto is on some timeline. At the same time a 20yo engages in activism for X, another engages in crypto for Y. Do we need to "end the patriachy" or "put metriocracy on the blockchain" ? My concern isnt just the skills issue, but also, everything bound up in the culture around it. I think we're seeing Tech get to a level of cultural prestige that invites on-mass young-buyin, and mass cultish movements. No doubt finance experienced similar in the 80s. But, I think, as finance people eventually learned to inculcate some level of cultural scepticism; tech seems it has yet to do so. In otherwords, we're unprepared for this coming's generation having bought into a tech-culture landscape which is composed of scams.
  - deebosong 4y ago
    Not saying I disagree with your concerns. But didn't Banksy say something similar about young artists being funneled into the for-profit corporate propaganda machine, trading their art skills and unique perspective (and expression of their interpretations) of the world at large, for a corporate paycheck? “The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.” Seems like every generation will need to battle with selling out, no matter the industry or era. But that being said, the web3 stuff feels pointedly scammier than even mobile/ social (which critics skewered even as it was burgeoning/ proliferating when it did, and people still rightfully criticize it today). ––– edited for posting wrong Banksy quote
- o_m 4y ago
  React/javascript is still a moving target, so a junior will easily catch up with someone with 10 times more experience
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ben_w 4y ago
    I'm beginning to feel the same about mobile, though I think the rate of change in iOS is at least slower than the memes[0] about JS-framework-of-the-week. I started iOS development with ObjC with manual reference counting; saw big and helpful changes with literal syntax and subscripting, ARC, and storyboards; I switched to Swift when it got OK; and now everyone seems to be going "storyboards and MVC are lame grandpa ways of doing things, let's use reactive asynchronous stuff everywhere!" I'm starting to feel old, and it's not just the half dozen individual grey hairs. [0] in the original sense of the word
- kareemsabri 4y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "make a name". As a dev I never needed to make a name, I just acquired skills that were useful for businesses (or my own business) through building applications. How you compete with people with 10 times the experience than you is through a lower salary, as always. I agree that "web3" skills are programming, and some of it is actually quite challenging and involves more computer science than your average web or mobile app, so I don't think web3 programmers are lost by any stretch of the imagination, even if that ecosystem collapses, they will be reabsorbed into the broader software industry.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  Yea, nobody is using phones anymore... LMAO it's all figured out Like how in 1995 desktop PC applications were all figured out. The web all figured out.
nathias 4y ago
- ekidd 4y ago
  At this point, web3 is becoming strongly associated with high-profile scams, many of them likely criminal. It's also associated with people who won't stop talking about how the blockchain will make your teeth whiter, or something equally unlikely. Blockchains are just decentralized Merkle trees. Merkle trees are a cool trick (look at git!). But the cost of decentralizing them, Bitcoin-style, has been massive carbon emissions. And the gain from decentralizing them? It's usually pretty tiny. I mean, I guess zero-trust decentralization makes it impossible to recover your coins if they're stolen or lost by an exchange, but that doesn't exactly seem like a huge advantage. /s In most of the financial blockchain pitches I've heard, you could replace proof-of-work via a time-stamping service run by a trusted clearing house. Just have someone like DTC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_Company keep track of the HEAD of git repository, and you'd be 95% of the way there. They already handle 100s of trillions of dollars of transactions a year with much less risk and drama than the average crypto exchange.
  - nathias 4y ago
    - z33k 4y ago
      The history of financial market regulation is written in blood. It started out very much like the crypto grift space where anything goes, until governments wised up to the negative effects and decided to regulate.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      If you're hoping "web3" is gonna negatively impact the power of well-off westerners, you're likely to be disappointed.
  - cameronh90 4y ago
dopidop 4y ago
I whole fully agree with you. That being said, this last sentence… > Someone needs to explain to the developing generation that this isnt the future.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  I think crypto is much more like pokemon than "the internet". Much more like "coin collectables" of the 80s, than financial derivatives. It's an attempt to destabalise domestic and international economic and financial systems that if ever even got close to being useful, would immediately be shut down. The moment I can walk into a random shop and buy a chocolate bar with cyrpto is the moment the whole system will collapse.
sdiacom 4y ago
I hang out in spaces for people entering tech, and I see the crypto advocates and grifters creeping in and around these spaces. It's extremely successful. Lately, I'm even seeing crypto grifts specifically aimed at people entering tech from non-traditional backgrounds, weaponising the language and discourse of diversity and empowerment to trick them into not just buying into the grift, but code the grift for them. For someone entering tech, everything they see is new and exciting and mystical and hard to understand. Without prior context, it's hard to see why overengineered crypto nonsense is different from all the other overengineered nonsense they're learning about at break-neck speed. For many of them, the only reason to enter tech to begin with is to earn a decent living. They lack the technical background to understand if what they're being paid to build is a grift or a legitimate business, and in the current market, it's increasingly in their best interest to not understand the difference. I believe we lost when we collectively accepted "software is eating the world" as an inevitable positive maxim of our reality. In retrospect, it seems self-evident that the end stage of this ideology-slash-self-fulfilling-prophecy is a socially-legitimized software-based "value" chain that ingests raw wealth and produces absolutely nothing of value.
- hocuspocus 4y ago
  I wouldn't really worry about people with a college degree. At one point or another you remember you classes on distributed systems and you realize the entire space is bullshit. I agree we'll see bootcamp grads and other people from non-traditional backgrounds get burned but it also gives them opportunities that wouldn't exist otherwise, so I'm not sure it's a net negative overall. The much bigger issue lies within politicians, the media and the general public who still believe we should let the scams happen for the sake of innovation, despite zero evidence thereof. Sadly I think we need a few more catastrophic events like FTX before people understand there's nothing to salvage.
  - enqk 4y ago
    Are you sure that college degrees inoculate people against bullshit?
    - 4y ago
bsenftner 4y ago
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
Capitalism means that the best and the brightest are working on what makes the most money not on what society needs. However one should not overstate sociopaths. Lots of people are still going into healthcare or teaching because there's more to life than money.
- paulgb 4y ago
  The tragic irony is that many of those teachers’ pension funds were the very ones making it lucrative for sociopaths to build crypto companies by blindly throwing money at them.
- lupire 4y ago
  Healthcare and teaching are seeing severe attrition.
csomar 4y ago
I had an interesting discussion with a young "developer" studying in "cyber-security". The guy was clearly out of his depth, and had a little idea about Internet security themes. He was struggling about finding an internship. I told him the market is still hot for tech people and security in general. His answer? "It's hard for me because I'm a person of color". I was a bit shocked there. He was just a bit browner than me, and far from black. It's going to be an interesting generation...
- lupire 4y ago
  "person of color" vs "white" isn't the same as colorism, it also includes other racial markers. Melania Trump is darks than many "black" "people of color".
birracerveza 4y ago
What the hell is this comment? And top comment on HN, what? If the technology is useful it will be used. If it's not it will die on its own. You can NOT police technical skill. What kind of mentality is this...?
- m0llusk 4y ago
  What technology? What use? The piece starts with a relatively straightforward value play being cast as not web3 enough. What even does that mean? And we are not supposed to talk about it, just let it crash around us like a wave?
  - birracerveza 4y ago
    I am directly addressing >But a cultural take-over of the technical skill space by a crypto religion is far more series and needs addressing ASAP. The technology is blockchain, and the skills are writing/reading smart contracts, developing websites making use of Wallets, and everything else that anti-crypto folks keep screaming "IT'S USELESS, USE POSTGRES INSTEAD". If that is true, then the ecosystem will die on its own. The fact that Web3 is being banged on ad-nauseam as a marketing buzzword, muddying the waters to the point that no one is sure what the hell Web3 even is, does not undermine the technological foundation, which is blockchain. Again, if blockchain IS useless then it will die off, but ... Bitcoin is still going strong a decade in, despite all the bullshit that surrounds it, and is likely impossible to kill off completely. That alone has merit, IMO. Of course, you are free to disagree. You can talk about it, but actively advocating that "cultural take-over of the technical skill space" needs "addressing" is complete and utter insanity. Blind hatred. You people have become as religious as crypto folks, except in the opposite direction. I've seen people advocating about blacklisting people who worked in crypto/web3 as well. You are completely losing it. I am honestly worried.
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  People criticize technology all the time on this forum. Is this pointless because useless technology would die on its own anyway? Maybe eventually, but only after wasting resources.
kkielhofner 4y ago
Very, very, very few people work in the cryptography or even blockchain aspects of any element of web3. The overwhelming majority of dev in the space looks exactly like web2. You whip up an Express/Lambda/whatever API backend that (at it's most "blockchain") uses a library like web3.js to talk to a blockchain node from a commercial service provider via HTTP or websockets. More likely than that you go further up the stack and use a really easy to consume library[0] from your API provider and don't even really get exposed to the nitty-gritty blockchain methods exposed by a lower level library like web3.js. Literally import lib, provide your API key, and do things like: const nftsForOwner = await alchemy.nft.getNftsForOwner("0xshah.eth"); I find it fascinating to meet devs in the space who say they're a "blockchain developer" and after a tiny amount of conversation you realize there's no difference whatsoever between what they're doing and wiring up a backend + frontend solution to something like Square (or whatever). So I agree with you completely - when these crypto companies or whatever start laying off left and right you can be certain the vast majority of the devs in the space can use what they've learned anywhere. [0] - https://docs.alchemy.com/reference/nft-api-quickstart#alchemy-sdk-recommended https://docs.alchemy.com/reference/nft-api-quickstart#alchem...
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  My company put me on a "web3" project recently, and as someone who has done some kind of web development, at least at the hobby level, since 1999, I can tell you that there's quite a bit of difference with web3. I think the web skills from a decade ago translate better to web-dev today than web-dev today translates to web3 development. With web3 you have to consider the different ways to get on-chain data, and the state is all on the blockchain. Testing is a nightmare and the tooling around development and deployment are still immature. And that's before even getting to solidity or other languages you use for the "backend"
  - kkielhofner 4y ago
    Sounds like you've been at this since I have (mid-late 90s as well)! I somewhat agree with you on the state of tooling compared to web dev today but I'm not sure it matters or is terribly relevant to the point OP is making. I've been in this space one way or another for five years so prepare for a (somewhat anecdotal) "dump" that you may (hopefully) find useful for the new project that you've been put on. You mentioned Solidity so let's assume an EVM compatible chain and ecosystem. At this point I'd call anything actually on chain the "back backend". Of course Solidity is the smart contract language but due to costs, speed, etc of the chains themselves the data is all over the place... That's how we've ended up with things like The Graph[0], Ceramic[1], etc. As you've likely already experienced interacting with the chains themselves in any capacity is remarkably creaky hence the plethora of somewhat ironically centralized API providers and solutions with many layers of insane amounts of code and backend infrastructure to make things actually work for anything beyond a toy (like the various Alchemy APIs I provided an example of). This is before you get into anything like IPFS, Filecoin, etc but once again the typical interaction with these is via heavily abstracted libraries and HTTP gateways that do their best to look like any other web2 service. Smart contracts, by their nature, are rarely written and rarely deployed. If you look at some of the biggest "apps" in the space smart contracts represent a tiny fraction of the amount of dev work compared to the overall solution. Take OpenSea (as one example) they've deployed a smart contract twice in five years of operation AFAIK. If you look at their frontend and API docs it becomes clear really quickly they've done a lot more work in areas that at the risk of deploying "No true Scotsman" I would say at least 95% of the dev work in web3 is effectively web2. Now that we're talking about smart contracts, the stakes are so high there is actually a fairly robust amount of tooling IMHO. Maybe not robust compared to the state of 30 years of web development but between OpenZeppelin[2], Hardhat[3], Truffle[4], etc there's a lot out there. From everything I've seen in the space over half my decade by the time you import a bunch of OpenZeppelin contracts there's almost always very little Solidity left to be written. As traditional cryptography devs have learned "writing your own crypto" is almost always a really bad idea. If you were to look at LOC for anything in the web3 space my original point is backup up by the data. Metmask is used by 30 million people and it's all web dev (backed by an Ethereum JSON-RPC[5] interface hosted by MetaMask sponsor Infura by default)... The rest of any user facing application is your frontend pulling in ethers[6] and MAYBE a bog standard web2 service/microservice backend. Then you're off to the races. There is SQL, NoSQL, etc all over the place in web3. From my personal experience and everything I've seen I'd venture to guess that maybe 1/50 devs in the space ever touches Solidity (likely much higher). Everyone else is doing what they've always done by reading the docs for whatever JS/TS libraries they're using. I've personally worked on many projects where web2 devs became "web3/blockchain devs" in an hour - to my original point of saying you're a "blockchain developer" because you're using ethers is really funny to me. My overall point being (and to assuage the concerns of OP) the vast majority of devs that start in web3 feel right at home in web2 and vice-versa. I know exactly one dev who I would call a serious "blockchain developer". They came from a web dev background and they're all in on Cardano which meant picking up Haskell (which would send most web devs running for the hills). If a dev were to start with Cardano + Haskell I have no idea where they would end up if they left "blockchain development". [0] - https://thegraph.com/en/ https://thegraph.com/en/ [1] - https://ceramic.network/ https://ceramic.network/ [2] - https://www.openzeppelin.com/contracts https://www.openzeppelin.com/contracts [3] - https://hardhat.org/ https://hardhat.org/ [4] - https://trufflesuite.com/ https://trufflesuite.com/ [5] - https://geth.ethereum.org/docs/rpc/server https://geth.ethereum.org/docs/rpc/server [6] - https://www.npmjs.com/package/ethers https://www.npmjs.com/package/ethers
lupire 4y ago
The more people go work on cryptocurrency, the less competition for other tech jobs.
caseyf 4y ago
> For the first time my anger over crypto moves into genuine concern. Is an entire generation of young people experiencing a kind of "pokemonisation" of crypto well into early adulthood? In other words, is a generation of 20-somethings wasting the better part of that decade on this tech, in these scams? I'm a middle aged developer who spent pandemic time in "web3" (ugh) dev discords and stuff. There are scammers, sure, but mostly there are a lot of young people who are learning tech in an environment that feels fun and rebellious and honestly a little like the old internet in a way. There is a lot more happening than just people building magic ponzi boxes. It's hard to feel anything but positive about seeing people excited about learning JS or OCaml or Python or Processing. That said, truly don't understand "web3" and this obsession with things being on a blockchain. It feels like people don't know their Internet history and also I don't understand why DWeb/indie web and web3/blockchain people are fighting since I think they'd be stronger together.
- pbronez 4y ago
  Personally, I think the Fediverse and IndieWeb are in a much stronger position. Key thing to watch: does Mastodon manage to ride the wave created by the Twitter collapse and become a socially relevant force? Even in some small communities? I'm much more bullish on small communities talking to each other with open source software (Fediverse) than magical crypto schemes that require deep economic expertise to design properly (which nobody on the project ever has). I do think Podcasting 2.0 is a neat idea. There's room in this world for micropayments. I just don't want it to be pervasive and I'm exhausted from the stream of scams.

k__ 4y ago

When I graduated, mobile was the big thing. That's old now. So, what to do to make a name for you? What big new field is there where you don't have to compete with people that have 10 times the experience than you? Independently of what you think web3 might solve or doesn't solve, it's still just programming. Someone learning cryptography and coding will get a job in other places.

mjburgess 4y ago
That's a hopeful upside, that, say an 18 is learning data technology, programming etc. via crypto. My concern is whether that's what they are learning; too early to tell, of course. One thing I'm also thinking is that crypto functions like "wokeism" in the sense it seems a parallel right-wing version of the same kind of cultural reformation. At the same time large retail biz profess their diversity credentials, their heads of research explain how crypto is on some timeline. At the same time a 20yo engages in activism for X, another engages in crypto for Y. Do we need to "end the patriachy" or "put metriocracy on the blockchain" ? My concern isnt just the skills issue, but also, everything bound up in the culture around it. I think we're seeing Tech get to a level of cultural prestige that invites on-mass young-buyin, and mass cultish movements. No doubt finance experienced similar in the 80s. But, I think, as finance people eventually learned to inculcate some level of cultural scepticism; tech seems it has yet to do so. In otherwords, we're unprepared for this coming's generation having bought into a tech-culture landscape which is composed of scams.
- deebosong 4y ago
  Not saying I disagree with your concerns. But didn't Banksy say something similar about young artists being funneled into the for-profit corporate propaganda machine, trading their art skills and unique perspective (and expression of their interpretations) of the world at large, for a corporate paycheck? “The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.” Seems like every generation will need to battle with selling out, no matter the industry or era. But that being said, the web3 stuff feels pointedly scammier than even mobile/ social (which critics skewered even as it was burgeoning/ proliferating when it did, and people still rightfully criticize it today). ––– edited for posting wrong Banksy quote
o_m 4y ago
React/javascript is still a moving target, so a junior will easily catch up with someone with 10 times more experience
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ben_w 4y ago
  I'm beginning to feel the same about mobile, though I think the rate of change in iOS is at least slower than the memes[0] about JS-framework-of-the-week. I started iOS development with ObjC with manual reference counting; saw big and helpful changes with literal syntax and subscripting, ARC, and storyboards; I switched to Swift when it got OK; and now everyone seems to be going "storyboards and MVC are lame grandpa ways of doing things, let's use reactive asynchronous stuff everywhere!" I'm starting to feel old, and it's not just the half dozen individual grey hairs. [0] in the original sense of the word
kareemsabri 4y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "make a name". As a dev I never needed to make a name, I just acquired skills that were useful for businesses (or my own business) through building applications. How you compete with people with 10 times the experience than you is through a lower salary, as always. I agree that "web3" skills are programming, and some of it is actually quite challenging and involves more computer science than your average web or mobile app, so I don't think web3 programmers are lost by any stretch of the imagination, even if that ecosystem collapses, they will be reabsorbed into the broader software industry.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rejectfinite 4y ago
Yea, nobody is using phones anymore... LMAO it's all figured out Like how in 1995 desktop PC applications were all figured out. The web all figured out.

nathias 4y ago

ekidd 4y ago
At this point, web3 is becoming strongly associated with high-profile scams, many of them likely criminal. It's also associated with people who won't stop talking about how the blockchain will make your teeth whiter, or something equally unlikely. Blockchains are just decentralized Merkle trees. Merkle trees are a cool trick (look at git!). But the cost of decentralizing them, Bitcoin-style, has been massive carbon emissions. And the gain from decentralizing them? It's usually pretty tiny. I mean, I guess zero-trust decentralization makes it impossible to recover your coins if they're stolen or lost by an exchange, but that doesn't exactly seem like a huge advantage. /s In most of the financial blockchain pitches I've heard, you could replace proof-of-work via a time-stamping service run by a trusted clearing house. Just have someone like DTC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_Company keep track of the HEAD of git repository, and you'd be 95% of the way there. They already handle 100s of trillions of dollars of transactions a year with much less risk and drama than the average crypto exchange.
- nathias 4y ago
  - z33k 4y ago
    The history of financial market regulation is written in blood. It started out very much like the crypto grift space where anything goes, until governments wised up to the negative effects and decided to regulate.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    If you're hoping "web3" is gonna negatively impact the power of well-off westerners, you're likely to be disappointed.
- cameronh90 4y ago

dopidop 4y ago

I whole fully agree with you. That being said, this last sentence… > Someone needs to explain to the developing generation that this isnt the future.

mjburgess 4y ago
I think crypto is much more like pokemon than "the internet". Much more like "coin collectables" of the 80s, than financial derivatives. It's an attempt to destabalise domestic and international economic and financial systems that if ever even got close to being useful, would immediately be shut down. The moment I can walk into a random shop and buy a chocolate bar with cyrpto is the moment the whole system will collapse.

sdiacom 4y ago

I hang out in spaces for people entering tech, and I see the crypto advocates and grifters creeping in and around these spaces. It's extremely successful. Lately, I'm even seeing crypto grifts specifically aimed at people entering tech from non-traditional backgrounds, weaponising the language and discourse of diversity and empowerment to trick them into not just buying into the grift, but code the grift for them. For someone entering tech, everything they see is new and exciting and mystical and hard to understand. Without prior context, it's hard to see why overengineered crypto nonsense is different from all the other overengineered nonsense they're learning about at break-neck speed. For many of them, the only reason to enter tech to begin with is to earn a decent living. They lack the technical background to understand if what they're being paid to build is a grift or a legitimate business, and in the current market, it's increasingly in their best interest to not understand the difference. I believe we lost when we collectively accepted "software is eating the world" as an inevitable positive maxim of our reality. In retrospect, it seems self-evident that the end stage of this ideology-slash-self-fulfilling-prophecy is a socially-legitimized software-based "value" chain that ingests raw wealth and produces absolutely nothing of value.

hocuspocus 4y ago
I wouldn't really worry about people with a college degree. At one point or another you remember you classes on distributed systems and you realize the entire space is bullshit. I agree we'll see bootcamp grads and other people from non-traditional backgrounds get burned but it also gives them opportunities that wouldn't exist otherwise, so I'm not sure it's a net negative overall. The much bigger issue lies within politicians, the media and the general public who still believe we should let the scams happen for the sake of innovation, despite zero evidence thereof. Sadly I think we need a few more catastrophic events like FTX before people understand there's nothing to salvage.
- enqk 4y ago
  Are you sure that college degrees inoculate people against bullshit?
  - 4y ago

bsenftner 4y ago

MomoXenosaga 4y ago

Capitalism means that the best and the brightest are working on what makes the most money not on what society needs. However one should not overstate sociopaths. Lots of people are still going into healthcare or teaching because there's more to life than money.

paulgb 4y ago
The tragic irony is that many of those teachers’ pension funds were the very ones making it lucrative for sociopaths to build crypto companies by blindly throwing money at them.
lupire 4y ago
Healthcare and teaching are seeing severe attrition.

csomar 4y ago

I had an interesting discussion with a young "developer" studying in "cyber-security". The guy was clearly out of his depth, and had a little idea about Internet security themes. He was struggling about finding an internship. I told him the market is still hot for tech people and security in general. His answer? "It's hard for me because I'm a person of color". I was a bit shocked there. He was just a bit browner than me, and far from black. It's going to be an interesting generation...

lupire 4y ago
"person of color" vs "white" isn't the same as colorism, it also includes other racial markers. Melania Trump is darks than many "black" "people of color".

birracerveza 4y ago

What the hell is this comment? And top comment on HN, what? If the technology is useful it will be used. If it's not it will die on its own. You can NOT police technical skill. What kind of mentality is this...?

m0llusk 4y ago
What technology? What use? The piece starts with a relatively straightforward value play being cast as not web3 enough. What even does that mean? And we are not supposed to talk about it, just let it crash around us like a wave?
- birracerveza 4y ago
  I am directly addressing >But a cultural take-over of the technical skill space by a crypto religion is far more series and needs addressing ASAP. The technology is blockchain, and the skills are writing/reading smart contracts, developing websites making use of Wallets, and everything else that anti-crypto folks keep screaming "IT'S USELESS, USE POSTGRES INSTEAD". If that is true, then the ecosystem will die on its own. The fact that Web3 is being banged on ad-nauseam as a marketing buzzword, muddying the waters to the point that no one is sure what the hell Web3 even is, does not undermine the technological foundation, which is blockchain. Again, if blockchain IS useless then it will die off, but ... Bitcoin is still going strong a decade in, despite all the bullshit that surrounds it, and is likely impossible to kill off completely. That alone has merit, IMO. Of course, you are free to disagree. You can talk about it, but actively advocating that "cultural take-over of the technical skill space" needs "addressing" is complete and utter insanity. Blind hatred. You people have become as religious as crypto folks, except in the opposite direction. I've seen people advocating about blacklisting people who worked in crypto/web3 as well. You are completely losing it. I am honestly worried.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
People criticize technology all the time on this forum. Is this pointless because useless technology would die on its own anyway? Maybe eventually, but only after wasting resources.

kkielhofner 4y ago

Very, very, very few people work in the cryptography or even blockchain aspects of any element of web3. The overwhelming majority of dev in the space looks exactly like web2. You whip up an Express/Lambda/whatever API backend that (at it's most "blockchain") uses a library like web3.js to talk to a blockchain node from a commercial service provider via HTTP or websockets. More likely than that you go further up the stack and use a really easy to consume library[0] from your API provider and don't even really get exposed to the nitty-gritty blockchain methods exposed by a lower level library like web3.js. Literally import lib, provide your API key, and do things like: const nftsForOwner = await alchemy.nft.getNftsForOwner("0xshah.eth"); I find it fascinating to meet devs in the space who say they're a "blockchain developer" and after a tiny amount of conversation you realize there's no difference whatsoever between what they're doing and wiring up a backend + frontend solution to something like Square (or whatever). So I agree with you completely - when these crypto companies or whatever start laying off left and right you can be certain the vast majority of the devs in the space can use what they've learned anywhere. [0] - https://docs.alchemy.com/reference/nft-api-quickstart#alchemy-sdk-recommended https://docs.alchemy.com/reference/nft-api-quickstart#alchem...

pcthrowaway 4y ago
My company put me on a "web3" project recently, and as someone who has done some kind of web development, at least at the hobby level, since 1999, I can tell you that there's quite a bit of difference with web3. I think the web skills from a decade ago translate better to web-dev today than web-dev today translates to web3 development. With web3 you have to consider the different ways to get on-chain data, and the state is all on the blockchain. Testing is a nightmare and the tooling around development and deployment are still immature. And that's before even getting to solidity or other languages you use for the "backend"
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  Sounds like you've been at this since I have (mid-late 90s as well)! I somewhat agree with you on the state of tooling compared to web dev today but I'm not sure it matters or is terribly relevant to the point OP is making. I've been in this space one way or another for five years so prepare for a (somewhat anecdotal) "dump" that you may (hopefully) find useful for the new project that you've been put on. You mentioned Solidity so let's assume an EVM compatible chain and ecosystem. At this point I'd call anything actually on chain the "back backend". Of course Solidity is the smart contract language but due to costs, speed, etc of the chains themselves the data is all over the place... That's how we've ended up with things like The Graph[0], Ceramic[1], etc. As you've likely already experienced interacting with the chains themselves in any capacity is remarkably creaky hence the plethora of somewhat ironically centralized API providers and solutions with many layers of insane amounts of code and backend infrastructure to make things actually work for anything beyond a toy (like the various Alchemy APIs I provided an example of). This is before you get into anything like IPFS, Filecoin, etc but once again the typical interaction with these is via heavily abstracted libraries and HTTP gateways that do their best to look like any other web2 service. Smart contracts, by their nature, are rarely written and rarely deployed. If you look at some of the biggest "apps" in the space smart contracts represent a tiny fraction of the amount of dev work compared to the overall solution. Take OpenSea (as one example) they've deployed a smart contract twice in five years of operation AFAIK. If you look at their frontend and API docs it becomes clear really quickly they've done a lot more work in areas that at the risk of deploying "No true Scotsman" I would say at least 95% of the dev work in web3 is effectively web2. Now that we're talking about smart contracts, the stakes are so high there is actually a fairly robust amount of tooling IMHO. Maybe not robust compared to the state of 30 years of web development but between OpenZeppelin[2], Hardhat[3], Truffle[4], etc there's a lot out there. From everything I've seen in the space over half my decade by the time you import a bunch of OpenZeppelin contracts there's almost always very little Solidity left to be written. As traditional cryptography devs have learned "writing your own crypto" is almost always a really bad idea. If you were to look at LOC for anything in the web3 space my original point is backup up by the data. Metmask is used by 30 million people and it's all web dev (backed by an Ethereum JSON-RPC[5] interface hosted by MetaMask sponsor Infura by default)... The rest of any user facing application is your frontend pulling in ethers[6] and MAYBE a bog standard web2 service/microservice backend. Then you're off to the races. There is SQL, NoSQL, etc all over the place in web3. From my personal experience and everything I've seen I'd venture to guess that maybe 1/50 devs in the space ever touches Solidity (likely much higher). Everyone else is doing what they've always done by reading the docs for whatever JS/TS libraries they're using. I've personally worked on many projects where web2 devs became "web3/blockchain devs" in an hour - to my original point of saying you're a "blockchain developer" because you're using ethers is really funny to me. My overall point being (and to assuage the concerns of OP) the vast majority of devs that start in web3 feel right at home in web2 and vice-versa. I know exactly one dev who I would call a serious "blockchain developer". They came from a web dev background and they're all in on Cardano which meant picking up Haskell (which would send most web devs running for the hills). If a dev were to start with Cardano + Haskell I have no idea where they would end up if they left "blockchain development". [0] - https://thegraph.com/en/ https://thegraph.com/en/ [1] - https://ceramic.network/ https://ceramic.network/ [2] - https://www.openzeppelin.com/contracts https://www.openzeppelin.com/contracts [3] - https://hardhat.org/ https://hardhat.org/ [4] - https://trufflesuite.com/ https://trufflesuite.com/ [5] - https://geth.ethereum.org/docs/rpc/server https://geth.ethereum.org/docs/rpc/server [6] - https://www.npmjs.com/package/ethers https://www.npmjs.com/package/ethers

lupire 4y ago

The more people go work on cryptocurrency, the less competition for other tech jobs.

caseyf 4y ago

> For the first time my anger over crypto moves into genuine concern. Is an entire generation of young people experiencing a kind of "pokemonisation" of crypto well into early adulthood? In other words, is a generation of 20-somethings wasting the better part of that decade on this tech, in these scams? I'm a middle aged developer who spent pandemic time in "web3" (ugh) dev discords and stuff. There are scammers, sure, but mostly there are a lot of young people who are learning tech in an environment that feels fun and rebellious and honestly a little like the old internet in a way. There is a lot more happening than just people building magic ponzi boxes. It's hard to feel anything but positive about seeing people excited about learning JS or OCaml or Python or Processing. That said, truly don't understand "web3" and this obsession with things being on a blockchain. It feels like people don't know their Internet history and also I don't understand why DWeb/indie web and web3/blockchain people are fighting since I think they'd be stronger together.

pbronez 4y ago
Personally, I think the Fediverse and IndieWeb are in a much stronger position. Key thing to watch: does Mastodon manage to ride the wave created by the Twitter collapse and become a socially relevant force? Even in some small communities? I'm much more bullish on small communities talking to each other with open source software (Fediverse) than magical crypto schemes that require deep economic expertise to design properly (which nobody on the project ever has). I do think Podcasting 2.0 is a neat idea. There's room in this world for micropayments. I just don't want it to be pervasive and I'm exhausted from the stream of scams.