9 ms·

Most Crypto Developers Aren't Working on Bitcoin or Ethereum

33 points by dcawrey 4y ago

superkuh 4y ago
Most crypto developers don't work on the cryptocurrencies that work as currencies because they're established and they want a higher return so they make yet another alt-coin. I'm not saying there aren't good new ideas in new alt-coins/etc. I'm just saying if we're making a big deal about the number of devs, the above is the main factor.
- 71a54xd 4y ago
  An annoying discord really only gets you so far
- robbyking 4y ago
  Right? You throw where the receiver is going, not where they are.
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  Eh, I think it's a pretty... ambitious claim that the time for new cryptocurrencies is over. I think that most cryptocurrencies are intentional scams, and the vast majority of the remainder are bad ideas, but there are literally thousands of cryptocurrencies released each year at this point. Out of that cesspool, I'd expect to see maybe 1 or 2 successful ideas a year. Note I didn't say "good", I said "successful"--in general I think cryptocurrencies are bad for society, but lots of things that are bad for society are successful. This past year, I think Avalanche Consensus and Near's Deep Sharding were pretty decent ideas. I don't know if they're good enough to translate into long-term success for either coin, but I suspect in the long run, deep sharding drawing inspiration from Near will end up in Ethereum. An idea which has been hinted at, which I think would be an improvement, would be an ecosystem which isn't programmable, but pulls successful ideas from programmable ecosystems. A few L1 chains at this point have added integrated oracles, but I don't think that takes the idea far enough. A chain with integrated UniSwap, integrated Aave, etc., and no way to add your own coins without consensus from validators, would have no scams and be more performant, while keeping the value of those products in the coin itself. It would be harder to build hype for, because you can't have a gold rush of developers coming in to build the same old coins and investors to try to get in early, but in the long run it seems more sustainable.
  - rrdharan 4y ago
    > literally millions of cryptocurrencies I believe that's literally not true. I think it's thousands.
    - kerkeslager 4y ago
      Thanks for the correction. Edited.
- j0hnyl 4y ago
  Crypto developers are not primarily working on alt coins. They're working on enterprise blockchains with niche applications, or working on building dapps on top of existing chains.
  - cm2187 4y ago
    Driven by MBAs who told their IT department to do crypto, whatever that means, because they read it is the future.
    - j0hnyl 4y ago
      I really don't think this is it. I've not heard of many tech companies just shifting their existing efforts onto crypto. A notable exception are big tech companies that are used to making lots of bets, so of course they allocate some of their resources in order to dabble. Personally, what I like about crypto as an eco-system is that it has a very low barrier to entry and there is lots of room for scrappy startups. If a few people want to get together and and build a protocol or dapp to run on top of Ethereum, they can do so, deploy their code, and if the market responds positively to their project, they can start collecting revenue immediately.
      - cm2187 4y ago
        Tech companies, I agree, because their management would be fairly IT-litterate. But outside of tech companies certainly.
  - superkuh 4y ago
    That's the ".../etc". Alt-coins/etc where etc is anything which creates a new pool of value which the developers skim off first. No one is seriously using blockchains for enterprise stuff because there's no reason to besides abusing the name for notability. If they're serious they use a database because as an enterprise there's always someone who all parties trust. Follow the flowchart. http://erewhon.superkuh.com/pictures/do-you-need-a-blockchain.png http://erewhon.superkuh.com/pictures/do-you-need-a-blockchai...
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  Creating a new e-coin has the perverse incentive of mining the low-hanging fruit in private, with the hope of it becoming valuable and making the founder(s) billionaires. I can't take seriously any e-coin that follows this path.
- Oxidation 4y ago
  > I'm not saying there aren't good new ideas in new alt-coins/etc I'll say it, though. What do all these coins do that's special except attempt to make money for the relevant company? What problem does alt-coin #45321 solve?
  - tromp 4y ago
    Some of the things they (well, one at least) do: - avoiding unnecessary complexity - avoiding early miner advantage - avoiding any financial rewards for its creators - improving privacy and scalability
    - Oxidation 4y ago
      None of those things are a purpose, though.
JStanton617 4y ago
What an absolute incineration of time, effort and skill
- switchbak 4y ago
  And natural gas, and coal to power many of these efforts.
  - j0hnyl 4y ago
    Most blockchains are not proof of work anymore.
    - thehumanmeat 4y ago
      Shhh, don't let that get mainstream yet. I'm still trying to stack ;).
    - switchbak 4y ago
      Most blockchains aren't highly used. I agree it's good we're moving off of that, but until Bitcoin fixes its act, it's still a shockingly awful waste of resources.
- Beaver117 4y ago
  It's better than working on ads
  - tchock23 4y ago
    Is it though? 1% of the time an ad helps me discover an interesting product I wasn't aware of. That's still better than the value crypto has added to my life.
    - eddsh1994 4y ago
      Ever tried to work for multiple countries with multiple banking systems? Total nightmare. When I was in England invoicing a US client required me to have a US bank account for them to pay (I ended up having to use an umbrella corp to make the payments easier as they had existing infra for a cut). Now I'm in the US when I invoice European clients payments take ages (2-3 days), when I invoice UK companies they tend to want to pay local bank accounts, and when I invoice Asia it's almost always a nightmare. USDC is instant, I can withdraw to my account in minutes, and the fee is lower. I know remittance payments from places like US to Nepal is far easier than trying with normal banking options. Even Wise still takes days instead of minutes for some transactions.
sublinear 4y ago
Gartner hype cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle There's not much enlightenment to be had on this topic, so not much productivity.
EGreg 4y ago
This article is a bit misleading for those who may think it’s saying most people are now coding with esoteric languages like Move or Clarity … the Ethereum Virtual Machine is an open standard and Solidity is a language and that is what is used by the vast majority of smart contract developers, even if they deploy to Polygon. It is a bit like saying most web developers and hosting companies aren’t using PHP because they are using PHP-FPM. Most HTML developers wrote gaudy sites <blink> and <marquee> tags. But the Web went on to create trillions in wealth for the world because it was based around an open protocol, HTTP. Most PHP developers wrote insecure garbage code, but back then businesses wanted to just have a site that works. It had some utility. But Web 2.0 went on to create even more utility for the world, even though its network effects increasingly created monopolies. Ethereum really democratized the ability to launch a token. So that’s what the vast majority of people did. Eventually there will be real applications worldwide, and what’s more, they will be produced by factories (like UniSwap) so they’ll just be a very reliable way to distribute open source software. People don’t appreciate that smart contracts can do a LOT more than that! https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications are examples of open source smart contracts designed to service communities, and you don’t need a token to use them. There is no ponzi, only utility. Just use them in your community — or not. However, the last 3 years during the bull market speculators found Intercoin very uninteresting, because by contrast a tulip mania could make a lot more returns, than selling actual products to communities.
- sublinear 4y ago
  Publishing of information, distribution of information, self service, and facilitation of services were very long standing problems before the web. The web solved them cheaply and easily and it did it by design, not by coincidence. It didn't need artificial hype because it was obvious what it was good for. What do cryptocurrencies do again?
  - EGreg 4y ago
    I didn’t even say cryptocurrencies. I said smart contracts. There are myriad applications but in essence what Web3 smart contracts do is secure some sort of community activity on the blockchain to make sure everyone knows the deal and no one can cheat. It only becomes important once the community grows enough to start securing something valuable. Like for example a marketplace that connects online students and teachers may be holding $20M in credits and you are trusting every employee to not misappropriate these credits. With Web3, the marketplace is just a Web2 interface that sets up the transactions, but at the end each user signs them with their own private keys, so the marketplace site has no liability nor presents a risk to the participants. Its commissions, like all other business logic, is immutable on the blockchain. Elections - you can make sure that no one can just go in the database and change all the votes, as they can with Stackoverflow moderator elections for example. Contests Escrow payments Auctions Recurring subscriptions You can combine them, for example you can make videoconferencing slots on your calendar which people around the world can book, to do office hours with you or take your course. People would bid on the slots and you’d take the top 10 people. Crypto takes care of all this and around the world. It is like if you asked “what does the Web do, since we have newspapers, magazines, radio, TV”? The answer is that it standardized communication on an open protocol called HTTP. So it allowed anyone to publish information for anyone else in the world to access. Smart contracts also represent a rebellion against having to trust institutions and governments. Now we have an alternative. The Web 1.0 democratized access to information, Web 2.0 allowed people to communicate and collaborate (but sadly didn’t democratize it) and Web 3.0 is radically open source and allows people to exchange value and participate in programs that don’t require trusting middlemen. The more complex the application, the more you as a network win by trusting the blockchain and smart contracts alone. Start by clicking the link above if you want to get more examples of applications. Cryptocurrency by itself is just a first generation toy like space invaders or personal home pages. The space will evolve, and you can bury your head in the sand or you can spend 3 mins to click a link. Here are some more applications that increase donor and investor confidence and break down global barriers: https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees/ https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees/ https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-raise-money-for-your-project/2697 https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-rai...
not2b 4y ago
Sure, they want their own con, oops typo, their own coin.
- guywithahat 4y ago
  I mean some are legitimate services. I've never intentionally invested in crypto but I use it to pay for services or donate money all the time
  - chx 4y ago
    All crypto are a scam. They can not be anything else because transaction fees make them a negative sum game. Everything else is just a lot of smoke and mirrors over this very basic and fundamental fact.
    - marcusverus 4y ago
      All non-cash transactions have associated fees--they're just obfuscated because consumers don't pay them directly. Visa takes 1.15% of every transaction, for example. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Crypto fees are too high, though. The average ETH transaction is, I think, ~$6. That means it's uneconomical in the vast majority of cases. Of course, everyone who uses it knows this, which makes for an odd scam, don't you think?
      - chx 4y ago
        But you can have cash transactions, the rest is convenience. You can not have that with crypto.
      - diego_sandoval 4y ago
        The fees in most Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Monero and Litecoin transactions are fractions of a cent.
    - rom-antics 4y ago
      All of life is a scam. The net amount of entropy in the universe continually increases. Existence itself is a negative sum game. In a cosmic blink of an eye, the sun will swallow the earth and humanity will go extinct. Any meaning people find in life is just a lot of smoke and mirrors over this very basic and fundamental fact.
rubyist5eva 4y ago
Of course not, they’re too busy coming up with their own Ponzi scheme.
creese 4y ago
This article is a bit disingenuous. Optimism, Arbitrum, and Starknet are all part of the Ethereum ecosystem. Technically, Polygon PoS isn't, but Polygon zkEVM definitely is.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rom-antics 4y ago
  It doesn't seem disingenuous to me. Most open source developers aren't working on Linux, even if most are working in the Linux ecosystem.
  - Kranar 4y ago
    Exactly, now consider how absurd it would be to say "Most developers aren't working on Windows, Linux, or macOS."
    - rom-antics 4y ago
      If you were following the pattern in the title, you'd say "Most operating system developers aren't working on Windows, Linux, or macOS". That might very well be true.
paulpauper 4y ago
Such metrics can be easily misleading. Even making a tiny modification to code can count as a request or an update.
malikNF 4y ago
Some of the comments here are like you are not even trying to understand cryptocurrencies and blockchains. Its like you just got scammed by trying to get rich fast and now all of a sudden every single crypto is a scam to you. To the people saying theres absolutely no use of cryptocurrencies, say that to people who were able to save some of their money when fleeing war torn regions. Tell that to people who whos pay-checks are getting stolen by banks. Tell that to people who are finally getting access to loans in impoverished regions. Tell that to activists banned by governments who get to fight another day. Tell that to people who’s governments devalued their currency who has basically got cut out of a way to trade. Yes criminals use crypto! But these crimes didn’t magically appear because of crypto. Dont forget fiat has had a monopoly on these crimes before 2009.
- nailer 4y ago
  It’s like everyone decided that after a billion shady ‘AI chatbot that doesn’t work’ startups in 2015 that ML was a scam.
zubairq 4y ago
Correct. 95% of the work on a crypto project is just HTML, CSS, Javascript, and maybe NodeJS
colesantiago 4y ago
Any developer that works on crypto are almost always paid in a useless token that is ready to be dumped on retail and are complicit in the scams. And yes, all of crypto is a scam. There are no exceptions. Even if you try and resticker poker chips as chocolate gold coins and sell them to the public as with what all of crypto does. I can't wait for hard regulations to completely kill these bullshit jobs in this scam industry, the layoffs are just the start.
labrador 4y ago
Without the California Gold Rush we wouldn't have Levi's® jeans, so maybe some good will come out of this crypto get-rich-quick activity.
- bdcravens 4y ago
  Web 2.0 was built atop the graves of the Dotcom boom.
  - labrador 4y ago
    When asked why more people don't follow his investment strategy, Warren Buffet replied "Because nobody wants to get rich slow"
alangibson 4y ago
Someone wake me up when there's an audited, redeemable stable coin with several second transaction times and double digit cent transaction fees.
- nailer 4y ago
  Here’s me using Solana: https://twitter.com/portalpayments/status/1622286467136462850 https://twitter.com/portalpayments/status/162228646713646285... Solana transaction fees are fractions of a cent as you can see. Portal, which my cofounder snd I wrote, supports Solana’s transaction priority fees (which still costs less than a cent), which gets transactions into blocks faster, so less than a second as you saw in the video. The transaction fees are based on compute rather than amount which you probably know, so it could have been a million USDC and the price would be flat. USDC is considered the best capitalised stablecoin and Portal defaults to it (or EUROC in future) because we care about payments more than speculation.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - alangibson 4y ago
    I've flirted with USDC as a solution, but AFAIK it's only received attestations not audits. In that case it might as well beonopoly money.
    - nailer 4y ago
      Moody’s just announced that it intends to rate stablecoins which may help (if you more ratings agencies) but yes totally agreed around audits or proof of reserves.
- siftrics 4y ago
  USDC on Solana has sub-second transaction times and 6 digits of precision.
  - 4y ago
photon12 4y ago
One question I have in all of this: are people building and using these apps actually marking all transactions as capital losses or gains? [1] A big thing that stops me from even playing around in these systems is not wanting to deal with the tax hassle. [1] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/digital-assets https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
0xmarcin 4y ago
Isn't this expected. Bitcoin seems like a completed project, you can fine tune it to get better perf, fix security issues. Any significant architectural change is basically impossible now without breaking backward compatibility. Not only that, you have to persuade miners to use the new code. I remember the hate around increasing bitcoin block size to 8MB (to allow for faster transaction processing, on par with debit cards), which lead to creating Bitcoin Cash fork. Bitcoin is like git basically, it works, most of the crypto fans are happy with it. Non tech people are using nice UIs without any understanding what happens to their money. OTOH I have friends that work "around crypto", they either work on new coins that provide privacy/speed/eco-friendliness or create exchanges or create other financial stuff like crypto robo-advisors that buy/sell according to user spec algo. The scene looks similar to what hedge funds are doing on major stock exchanges.

33 points by dcawrey 4y ago

Most crypto developers don't work on the cryptocurrencies that work as currencies because they're established and they want a higher return so they make yet another alt-coin. I'm not saying there aren't good new ideas in new alt-coins/etc. I'm just saying if we're making a big deal about the number of devs, the above is the main factor.

71a54xd 4y ago
An annoying discord really only gets you so far
robbyking 4y ago
Right? You throw where the receiver is going, not where they are.
kerkeslager 4y ago
Eh, I think it's a pretty... ambitious claim that the time for new cryptocurrencies is over. I think that most cryptocurrencies are intentional scams, and the vast majority of the remainder are bad ideas, but there are literally thousands of cryptocurrencies released each year at this point. Out of that cesspool, I'd expect to see maybe 1 or 2 successful ideas a year. Note I didn't say "good", I said "successful"--in general I think cryptocurrencies are bad for society, but lots of things that are bad for society are successful. This past year, I think Avalanche Consensus and Near's Deep Sharding were pretty decent ideas. I don't know if they're good enough to translate into long-term success for either coin, but I suspect in the long run, deep sharding drawing inspiration from Near will end up in Ethereum. An idea which has been hinted at, which I think would be an improvement, would be an ecosystem which isn't programmable, but pulls successful ideas from programmable ecosystems. A few L1 chains at this point have added integrated oracles, but I don't think that takes the idea far enough. A chain with integrated UniSwap, integrated Aave, etc., and no way to add your own coins without consensus from validators, would have no scams and be more performant, while keeping the value of those products in the coin itself. It would be harder to build hype for, because you can't have a gold rush of developers coming in to build the same old coins and investors to try to get in early, but in the long run it seems more sustainable.
- rrdharan 4y ago
  > literally millions of cryptocurrencies I believe that's literally not true. I think it's thousands.
  - kerkeslager 4y ago
    Thanks for the correction. Edited.
j0hnyl 4y ago
Crypto developers are not primarily working on alt coins. They're working on enterprise blockchains with niche applications, or working on building dapps on top of existing chains.
- cm2187 4y ago
  Driven by MBAs who told their IT department to do crypto, whatever that means, because they read it is the future.
  - j0hnyl 4y ago
    I really don't think this is it. I've not heard of many tech companies just shifting their existing efforts onto crypto. A notable exception are big tech companies that are used to making lots of bets, so of course they allocate some of their resources in order to dabble. Personally, what I like about crypto as an eco-system is that it has a very low barrier to entry and there is lots of room for scrappy startups. If a few people want to get together and and build a protocol or dapp to run on top of Ethereum, they can do so, deploy their code, and if the market responds positively to their project, they can start collecting revenue immediately.
    - cm2187 4y ago
      Tech companies, I agree, because their management would be fairly IT-litterate. But outside of tech companies certainly.
- superkuh 4y ago
  That's the ".../etc". Alt-coins/etc where etc is anything which creates a new pool of value which the developers skim off first. No one is seriously using blockchains for enterprise stuff because there's no reason to besides abusing the name for notability. If they're serious they use a database because as an enterprise there's always someone who all parties trust. Follow the flowchart. http://erewhon.superkuh.com/pictures/do-you-need-a-blockchain.png http://erewhon.superkuh.com/pictures/do-you-need-a-blockchai...
ASalazarMX 4y ago
Creating a new e-coin has the perverse incentive of mining the low-hanging fruit in private, with the hope of it becoming valuable and making the founder(s) billionaires. I can't take seriously any e-coin that follows this path.
Oxidation 4y ago
> I'm not saying there aren't good new ideas in new alt-coins/etc I'll say it, though. What do all these coins do that's special except attempt to make money for the relevant company? What problem does alt-coin #45321 solve?
- tromp 4y ago
  Some of the things they (well, one at least) do: - avoiding unnecessary complexity - avoiding early miner advantage - avoiding any financial rewards for its creators - improving privacy and scalability
  - Oxidation 4y ago
    None of those things are a purpose, though.

JStanton617 4y ago

What an absolute incineration of time, effort and skill

switchbak 4y ago
And natural gas, and coal to power many of these efforts.
- j0hnyl 4y ago
  Most blockchains are not proof of work anymore.
  - thehumanmeat 4y ago
    Shhh, don't let that get mainstream yet. I'm still trying to stack ;).
  - switchbak 4y ago
    Most blockchains aren't highly used. I agree it's good we're moving off of that, but until Bitcoin fixes its act, it's still a shockingly awful waste of resources.
Beaver117 4y ago
It's better than working on ads
- tchock23 4y ago
  Is it though? 1% of the time an ad helps me discover an interesting product I wasn't aware of. That's still better than the value crypto has added to my life.
  - eddsh1994 4y ago
    Ever tried to work for multiple countries with multiple banking systems? Total nightmare. When I was in England invoicing a US client required me to have a US bank account for them to pay (I ended up having to use an umbrella corp to make the payments easier as they had existing infra for a cut). Now I'm in the US when I invoice European clients payments take ages (2-3 days), when I invoice UK companies they tend to want to pay local bank accounts, and when I invoice Asia it's almost always a nightmare. USDC is instant, I can withdraw to my account in minutes, and the fee is lower. I know remittance payments from places like US to Nepal is far easier than trying with normal banking options. Even Wise still takes days instead of minutes for some transactions.

sublinear 4y ago

Gartner hype cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle There's not much enlightenment to be had on this topic, so not much productivity.

EGreg 4y ago

This article is a bit misleading for those who may think it’s saying most people are now coding with esoteric languages like Move or Clarity … the Ethereum Virtual Machine is an open standard and Solidity is a language and that is what is used by the vast majority of smart contract developers, even if they deploy to Polygon. It is a bit like saying most web developers and hosting companies aren’t using PHP because they are using PHP-FPM. Most HTML developers wrote gaudy sites <blink> and <marquee> tags. But the Web went on to create trillions in wealth for the world because it was based around an open protocol, HTTP. Most PHP developers wrote insecure garbage code, but back then businesses wanted to just have a site that works. It had some utility. But Web 2.0 went on to create even more utility for the world, even though its network effects increasingly created monopolies. Ethereum really democratized the ability to launch a token. So that’s what the vast majority of people did. Eventually there will be real applications worldwide, and what’s more, they will be produced by factories (like UniSwap) so they’ll just be a very reliable way to distribute open source software. People don’t appreciate that smart contracts can do a LOT more than that! https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications are examples of open source smart contracts designed to service communities, and you don’t need a token to use them. There is no ponzi, only utility. Just use them in your community — or not. However, the last 3 years during the bull market speculators found Intercoin very uninteresting, because by contrast a tulip mania could make a lot more returns, than selling actual products to communities.

sublinear 4y ago
Publishing of information, distribution of information, self service, and facilitation of services were very long standing problems before the web. The web solved them cheaply and easily and it did it by design, not by coincidence. It didn't need artificial hype because it was obvious what it was good for. What do cryptocurrencies do again?
- EGreg 4y ago
  I didn’t even say cryptocurrencies. I said smart contracts. There are myriad applications but in essence what Web3 smart contracts do is secure some sort of community activity on the blockchain to make sure everyone knows the deal and no one can cheat. It only becomes important once the community grows enough to start securing something valuable. Like for example a marketplace that connects online students and teachers may be holding $20M in credits and you are trusting every employee to not misappropriate these credits. With Web3, the marketplace is just a Web2 interface that sets up the transactions, but at the end each user signs them with their own private keys, so the marketplace site has no liability nor presents a risk to the participants. Its commissions, like all other business logic, is immutable on the blockchain. Elections - you can make sure that no one can just go in the database and change all the votes, as they can with Stackoverflow moderator elections for example. Contests Escrow payments Auctions Recurring subscriptions You can combine them, for example you can make videoconferencing slots on your calendar which people around the world can book, to do office hours with you or take your course. People would bid on the slots and you’d take the top 10 people. Crypto takes care of all this and around the world. It is like if you asked “what does the Web do, since we have newspapers, magazines, radio, TV”? The answer is that it standardized communication on an open protocol called HTTP. So it allowed anyone to publish information for anyone else in the world to access. Smart contracts also represent a rebellion against having to trust institutions and governments. Now we have an alternative. The Web 1.0 democratized access to information, Web 2.0 allowed people to communicate and collaborate (but sadly didn’t democratize it) and Web 3.0 is radically open source and allows people to exchange value and participate in programs that don’t require trusting middlemen. The more complex the application, the more you as a network win by trusting the blockchain and smart contracts alone. Start by clicking the link above if you want to get more examples of applications. Cryptocurrency by itself is just a first generation toy like space invaders or personal home pages. The space will evolve, and you can bury your head in the sand or you can spend 3 mins to click a link. Here are some more applications that increase donor and investor confidence and break down global barriers: https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees/ https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees/ https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-raise-money-for-your-project/2697 https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-rai...

not2b 4y ago

Sure, they want their own con, oops typo, their own coin.

guywithahat 4y ago
I mean some are legitimate services. I've never intentionally invested in crypto but I use it to pay for services or donate money all the time
- chx 4y ago
  All crypto are a scam. They can not be anything else because transaction fees make them a negative sum game. Everything else is just a lot of smoke and mirrors over this very basic and fundamental fact.
  - marcusverus 4y ago
    All non-cash transactions have associated fees--they're just obfuscated because consumers don't pay them directly. Visa takes 1.15% of every transaction, for example. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Crypto fees are too high, though. The average ETH transaction is, I think, ~$6. That means it's uneconomical in the vast majority of cases. Of course, everyone who uses it knows this, which makes for an odd scam, don't you think?
    - chx 4y ago
      But you can have cash transactions, the rest is convenience. You can not have that with crypto.
    - diego_sandoval 4y ago
      The fees in most Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Monero and Litecoin transactions are fractions of a cent.
  - rom-antics 4y ago
    All of life is a scam. The net amount of entropy in the universe continually increases. Existence itself is a negative sum game. In a cosmic blink of an eye, the sun will swallow the earth and humanity will go extinct. Any meaning people find in life is just a lot of smoke and mirrors over this very basic and fundamental fact.

rubyist5eva 4y ago

Of course not, they’re too busy coming up with their own Ponzi scheme.

creese 4y ago

This article is a bit disingenuous. Optimism, Arbitrum, and Starknet are all part of the Ethereum ecosystem. Technically, Polygon PoS isn't, but Polygon zkEVM definitely is.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rom-antics 4y ago
It doesn't seem disingenuous to me. Most open source developers aren't working on Linux, even if most are working in the Linux ecosystem.
- Kranar 4y ago
  Exactly, now consider how absurd it would be to say "Most developers aren't working on Windows, Linux, or macOS."
  - rom-antics 4y ago
    If you were following the pattern in the title, you'd say "Most operating system developers aren't working on Windows, Linux, or macOS". That might very well be true.

paulpauper 4y ago

Such metrics can be easily misleading. Even making a tiny modification to code can count as a request or an update.

malikNF 4y ago

Some of the comments here are like you are not even trying to understand cryptocurrencies and blockchains. Its like you just got scammed by trying to get rich fast and now all of a sudden every single crypto is a scam to you. To the people saying theres absolutely no use of cryptocurrencies, say that to people who were able to save some of their money when fleeing war torn regions. Tell that to people who whos pay-checks are getting stolen by banks. Tell that to people who are finally getting access to loans in impoverished regions. Tell that to activists banned by governments who get to fight another day. Tell that to people who’s governments devalued their currency who has basically got cut out of a way to trade. Yes criminals use crypto! But these crimes didn’t magically appear because of crypto. Dont forget fiat has had a monopoly on these crimes before 2009.

nailer 4y ago
It’s like everyone decided that after a billion shady ‘AI chatbot that doesn’t work’ startups in 2015 that ML was a scam.

zubairq 4y ago

Correct. 95% of the work on a crypto project is just HTML, CSS, Javascript, and maybe NodeJS

colesantiago 4y ago

Any developer that works on crypto are almost always paid in a useless token that is ready to be dumped on retail and are complicit in the scams. And yes, all of crypto is a scam. There are no exceptions. Even if you try and resticker poker chips as chocolate gold coins and sell them to the public as with what all of crypto does. I can't wait for hard regulations to completely kill these bullshit jobs in this scam industry, the layoffs are just the start.

labrador 4y ago

Without the California Gold Rush we wouldn't have Levi's® jeans, so maybe some good will come out of this crypto get-rich-quick activity.

bdcravens 4y ago
Web 2.0 was built atop the graves of the Dotcom boom.
- labrador 4y ago
  When asked why more people don't follow his investment strategy, Warren Buffet replied "Because nobody wants to get rich slow"

alangibson 4y ago

Someone wake me up when there's an audited, redeemable stable coin with several second transaction times and double digit cent transaction fees.

nailer 4y ago
Here’s me using Solana: https://twitter.com/portalpayments/status/1622286467136462850 https://twitter.com/portalpayments/status/162228646713646285... Solana transaction fees are fractions of a cent as you can see. Portal, which my cofounder snd I wrote, supports Solana’s transaction priority fees (which still costs less than a cent), which gets transactions into blocks faster, so less than a second as you saw in the video. The transaction fees are based on compute rather than amount which you probably know, so it could have been a million USDC and the price would be flat. USDC is considered the best capitalised stablecoin and Portal defaults to it (or EUROC in future) because we care about payments more than speculation.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- alangibson 4y ago
  I've flirted with USDC as a solution, but AFAIK it's only received attestations not audits. In that case it might as well beonopoly money.
  - nailer 4y ago
    Moody’s just announced that it intends to rate stablecoins which may help (if you more ratings agencies) but yes totally agreed around audits or proof of reserves.
siftrics 4y ago
USDC on Solana has sub-second transaction times and 6 digits of precision.
- 4y ago

photon12 4y ago

One question I have in all of this: are people building and using these apps actually marking all transactions as capital losses or gains? [1] A big thing that stops me from even playing around in these systems is not wanting to deal with the tax hassle. [1] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/digital-assets https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

0xmarcin 4y ago

Isn't this expected. Bitcoin seems like a completed project, you can fine tune it to get better perf, fix security issues. Any significant architectural change is basically impossible now without breaking backward compatibility. Not only that, you have to persuade miners to use the new code. I remember the hate around increasing bitcoin block size to 8MB (to allow for faster transaction processing, on par with debit cards), which lead to creating Bitcoin Cash fork. Bitcoin is like git basically, it works, most of the crypto fans are happy with it. Non tech people are using nice UIs without any understanding what happens to their money. OTOH I have friends that work "around crypto", they either work on new coins that provide privacy/speed/eco-friendliness or create exchanges or create other financial stuff like crypto robo-advisors that buy/sell according to user spec algo. The scene looks similar to what hedge funds are doing on major stock exchanges.