I left earlier this year, and worked in the space for a couple of years. I started with a neutral position on crypto, I didn't even think about it much. More like, its easy and pays well. But if people want to waste their money on tokens, go for it, but its not my cup of tea.

Then I started to recognize that its predatory and actually not benign or harmless. It is taking advantage of people. It started to become gross, and nobody I worked with shared any views or skepticism that I had. They all pretty much treated it like a religion across the board. Glad I left. I turned down money that most would not get a chance at in their lifetime, but where that money came from did not sit right with me, nobody in that company deserved any of it. I guess I was not cutthroat enough ... seems like this space is reserved only for snakes, and fools.

I've worked at a crypto startup few years ago, on a quite high technical position, essentially a co-founder (one of many). The team ended up bullying, abusing and gaslighting me, because I didn't fit the narrative, I guess.

Cryptosphere is certainly a place for predators, that don't give a slightest f*ck about where the money come from.

> Cryptosphere is certainly a place for predators, that don't give a slightest f*ck about where the money come from.

No many do care where it comes from.

They deliberately seek and out target vulnerable people e.g. third world countries, retirees who they know will be susceptible to their scams.

> Then I started to recognize that its predatory and actually not benign or harmless. It is taking advantage of people.

Can't this be applied for most jobs in social media, advertising, lending and discretionary spending?

Sure can, many of us avoid jobs in social media, ads and lending for that reason

We are getting at least something useful from social networks. Like, actual social networking.

What you dont think safemoon brings you safely to the moon ?

Several years ago I would prefer to wait for some lay people to get safely to the moon and then decide for myself. Currently I think that the only people who will make it to the moon are founders and maybe first couple of layers of their Ponzi pyramid.

A fairer comparison will be gambling, sports games and drugs.

Sure I guess since they're voluntary. Much harder to opt out of big social media or ad agencies. But that makes my point even stronger since no one is forcing cryptocurrencies down your throat.

But, isn’t the key distinction that this is an unregulated space, which is heavily manipulated. Crypto investors cannot make proper informed decisions, because they are being mislead or outright lied to, and cheated, at a near constant rate. It’s optional for them to be sure, but they are being tricked.

You put a lot of faith in regulations. Take lottery for instance. It's almost entirely controlled by states in the US and they prey on the most vulnerable. They even have state gambling apps now so there's virtually no restriction when and how much you play.

I don't know how much sports gambling is regulated but I doubt its meaningful. Gambling is dangerous because a certain personality cannot control themselves. What can regulation do? Put a little warning? Make sure the house advantage is no more than X? That's not what makes gambling dangerous.

Drugs are same story. Heavily regulated to their detriment. At least with illegal drugs you know it's dangerous and could be abused. But when a doctor prescribes you heavy pain killers for a simple injury, it's not obvious how dangerous they are.

As drugs are dangerous for those predisposed to substance addiction, betting games dangerous to those predisposed to gambling addiction, crypto is dangerous for people who are predisposed to non-regulation addiction. I've seen far too many people addicted to the fantasy of non-regulation and it's effects that it's hard to find sympathy, but I try to stay grounded in viewing it as the disease it is.

One reason to have state-run lotteries is as a harm reduction tactic to keep organized crime out of it.

Social media has benefits (as much as we love to hate it) whether you agree or disagree. Crypto at this point is scams and get rich quick schemes. Not the same comparison.

Crypto has benefits. It's entertaining and some projects are kind of clubs which is fun for the participants. Also the technology is interesting at least to me. I learned a lot playing around with smart contracts and writing bots.

Some people get hurt and you could think the scammer portion outweighs the benefits. But saying there are no benefits is wrong

> no one is forcing cryptocurrencies down your throat.

But they are planning to.

Social media maybe, advertising not always (having been on the other side, thank god for advertising matching us with eventually happy customers), lending can be but also can help expand a business so...

Absolutely. I vowed over a decade ago to never work for social media. The data is coming in, and boy, was that the right decision. I've read in the last year:

* An Ugly Truth

* The Coddling of the American Mind

* Stolen Focus

It is horrifying what this does to us.

> It started to become gross, and nobody I worked with shared any views or skepticism that I had. They all pretty much treated it like a religion across the board.

When a description such as that starts to sound like a 1:1 Venn diagram overlap with multi level marketing, yeah, it's time to bail.

This is my experience with fintech in general, very much an "are we the baddies?"-sort of a place. Although the institutional side is better (even if the money isn't).

I don't get the point of crypto and so far I have understood it to be a gambling machine and get rich quick scheme.

Honestly, I will be a bit skeptical if I was hiring a crypto developer. But I wouldn't make a blanket decision. I would carefully analyze on a case by case basis but by default I will surely be less trusting initially. Sorry but this industry is full of scammers.

Indeed. It's not like you can't work on Crypto with good intentions (I have been following the Namecoin project for a while, they are under-funded and the team refuses to do any marketing; as a result, their currency have little value and they can't afford to pay the astronomical expenses other crypto projects pay)

But if you are going for any of these non-shiny companies (some of them are doing really hard engineering work), the pay and the benefits will be normal and maybe over below market-rates.

Good man/woman :)

I understand that some people just need a job to pay rent, and we all need to be a little selfish, making decisions that are right for us, but tech employees have a choice.

You can afford to not work for a sector of tech that is involved in predation on the gullible, or harvesting and selling personal data for profit, or trying to "hack" your brain by developing "addictive" technologies.

> It is taking advantage of people

I also don't find crypto very useful but how does it take advantage of people? do companies developing for crypto gain from someone using their services?

I'm one of the "haters". I see no value in crypto in 99.99% of crypto and in the cases that do make sense the actual use for it is borderline money laundering or tax evasion. All the "enthusiasts" seem to want to get rich by getting as many people as they can in their greater fool scheme of choice in the hopes of becoming a Bitcoin billionaire. The obnoxious fan base and practical scams coming out of the marketing department are what I despise most about the whole thing.

However, I don't foster any negative feelings towards developers per se. A job's a job, and crypto isn't exactly as easy as your run of the mill CRUD application development.

By working in the ethereum space you've proven you can work with/around obscure tools, learn strange jargon, probably have some knowledge of cryptographic algorithms, and a willingness to do a deep dive in what you believe in. I'm no hiring manager, but to me that all seems like a bunch of skills that will transfer to many businesses outside crypto.

There's more to a person than what areas of business they have experience in. You can work for Big Oil, Facebook/Google/UmbrellaCorp, or Nestlé and be a perfectly good person just doing their job. Anyone refusing you simply because you worked in crypto at some point is short-sighted.

Even if you are a crucial part in the next big rug-pull-sold-as-ending-world-hunger, I honestly doubt you'll run into too many ethical qualms unless you screw up enough to actually break the law and get caught. It's not like Meta or Wells Fargo suddenly care about ethics if you can talk things straight enough, most big companies are morally bankrupt anyway.

> I don't foster any negative feelings towards developers per se. A job's a job

Nah. This line of reasoning excuses any activity one might be involved with because "it's just my job". Doesn't work like that. The idea that you carry zero moral (or ethical or even legal) culpability because you're drawing a paycheck and being "told" what to do is what every person working for the companies that are deeply damaging our society tells themselves. Because the alternative (the reality) is really hard to deal with.

GP is right to be concerned.

If a job doesn't hire you because of the industry you worked in rather than lacking skills, then they're doing you a favor. Purity tests are bad and most successful businesses can't afford to apply them. And if they did they would be selecting for a toxic personality. You may pass your own purity test, but you're likely to find some employee that has a qualm about some choice of yours. Avoid places like that

It doesn’t need to be a “purity test”. It’s sufficient that if there are multiple candidates with seemingly roughly equal skills, the one not having worked in crypto gets the job because they seem slightly more likely to be a good cultural fit.

Spoken like an apologist. There has always been incentive to cross ethical, moral and legal lines "for the money", and this has been so since time immemorial. We are not living in some special moment in history, neither does crypto hold a monopoly on shady actors.

None of your either-ors apply.

There are pressures, making it a choice of the actor. That actor will have consequences regardless of what choice they make. I disagree that 'i needed money' is a valid excuse to do things you morally disagree with. I also disagree that 'i needed money' is an excuse for others to do things that they believe is immoral.

Personally I don't like crypto so maybe that's where my opinion is coming from. But it sure feels like everywhere in life we are presented with a choice to do what is right and what is easy. Both have consequences.

Software engineering jobs are extremely cushy. You are not working in an Amazon warehouse to make the ends meet.

They are when you're 30 years old in a boom market. The fact that people act like unemployment is impossible suggests no one was an adult during 2001-3. That means you know neither age discrimination nor recession.

Ah, the idealism of youth.

> A job's a job

That's something that doesn't sit well with me. Not all jobs are equal. Some are unethical, or worse. And OP is in the unethical camp, at least by association, and also tarred by the stereotypes of exploitation and fraud.

> Anyone refusing you simply because you worked in crypto at some point is short-sighted.

I would also not want to hire/work with anyone who's worked for facebook or google in the past 5 years. It's not as if there was a great shortage of jobs.

>I would also not want to hire/work with anyone who's worked for facebook or google in the past 5 years

These companies have a plethora of things to work on and you have the ability to positively impact most of the planet (billions of people). You are oversimplifing things if you think they are all evil people who would be bad to work with.

> you have the ability to positively impact most of the planet (billions of people)

Hundreds of thousands of people work there, yet they haven't managed to achieve that positive impact.

You don't think Google has achieved a positive impact?

Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Chrome, Android, Cloud, Pixel, Nest, Fitbit, Stadia, Drive? Not to mention their other projects like DeepMind / AlphaFold?

>yet they haven't managed to achieve that positive impact.

You don't reach billions of users without positively impacting people who use your service. If there was no positive impact people would simply abandon Google's and Facebook's services.

“If there was no positive impact people would simply abandon meth.”

Yes, if there was no positive impact then basically no one new would start using meth and the meth user population would eventually die out.

If you had an addictive drug and all it did was make all your teeth fall out with no extra side effects almost no one would take it.

While yes, Meth is dangerous and addictive I don't think what Google and Facebook are doing is bad. How is Google giving people access to the world's data or Facebook connecting the world a bad thing? They are trying to do good things and are constantly trying to reduce the harm their services bring to people. They have entire organizations within these companies for doing so.

> If you had an addictive drug and all it did was make all your teeth fall out with no extra side effects almost no one would take it.

I can't help but notice that you dropped "positive" here, and I can only assume it's on purpose, as otherwise your argument would like quite silly. People using something does not mean it's positive. The list doesn't really stop at meth.

Do you really equate product growth with a positive impact on people..? Developers working for Facebook or Google are fully aware their employer pays their salary by selling other peoples data. There is no excuse other than immorality.

Yes, no one is forcing people to use Google's search product. People use it because it has a positive impact in helping them find things easier.

>by selling other peoples data

Neither of these companies sell user data. Both these companies take user privacy more seriously than almost every other company on Earth.

> Neither of these companies sell user data. Both these companies take user privacy more seriously than almost every other company on Earth.

That depends on your idea of privacy. Collecting and retaining incredible amounts of data about people even without their consent isn’t my idea of respecting privacy.

Yet GP said "selling data", not "collecting data". Google and Facebook collect hordes of data and sell access to insights of it, but not the underlying data itself as that data is far too valuable.

We can play semantics all day, but both companies sell insights and slices of data to ad customers, while acting benevolent and community-focused to their users. The valuable hordes of data you mention have been collected without users actually understanding what or why this is happening.

If you only care about getting a good pay from such a job, fine. But that just makes you immoral in my book.

Except the claim was that Facebook and Google can't possibly be privacy conscious as they _SELL_ user data.

Every part of that sentence was wrong, and you are trying to pretend otherwise.

In your opinion. Other people disagree. Whose opinion should they listen to?

(And more in the spirit of the specific question parent raised - someone working at Facebook on funding charities. Are they "bad" for doing that job?)

That's not really an opinion though. Facebook continues to ignore morality in it's chase to maximize profits.

Can you provide some evidence behind this claim that they ignore morality?

If the people who work there have the power to make it good … why didnt they do it the last 20 Years. Insted the collectivly build one of the worst side of internet

Can you describe what makes you think it's one of the worst sides of the internet? I get immense utility from Google's services using mostly free services. All of these free awesome stuff makes it one of the best sides of the internet for me.

It was more facebook. But google sucks also. You are just selling your data for a service that would cost you 10 bucks a month. And google is pushing there internet standard instead of gnu or free ones. And google has also a adnetwork that has the same harm potential as facebook … only a little less worse

Edit: youtube is a win for me and i use it a lot … but its the same. I give data away that I dont want to share. I would rather pay for services than pay with data

I wouldn't hire anyone who used google or facebook because they are unethical. And if I see someone wearing a brand I dislike I pour paint over them. Stereotypes are perfectly acceptable to go by in 2022.

>A job's a job

But most people involved in the scam claim to be "just doing their job".

If you're working for an employer or in an industry that you yourself consider a bit shady, you are morally obligated to leave. Society can't function otherwise.

My favorite conversation to observe in person now is the “yea my industry isn’t actually bad and I’m a good person (says the person in finance, social media, etc) but yours is, how do you live with yourself?”

The bartender is morally (and occasionally legally) obligated to not serve alcohol to someone who is drunk. And to take car keys away from impaired people.

The analogy holds, imo.

Fair points, however at least in Australia is that bartenders are legally supposed to stop serving people that are drunk, (Our Responsible Service of Alcohol laws say 'it is against the law to serve alcohol to an intoxicated customer'. My anecdotal evidence is that you actually have to be too obliterated to verbally get the order out or to stand up for that to happen.

I understand a job's a job, but it's not as easy as you make it sound. Developers have ample opportunities and have the luxury of being able to make career decisions autonomously. Ofcourse I don't hate crypto developers, but it's not wrong to question their decisions.

Well - it's a gold rush - so I see no reason to not get everything they provided - especially the bad parts.

And yet after the gold rush there is stuff left - San Francisco for example. After the crypto rush is over some infrastructure, knowledge, code will also be left and it may find uses and applications.

I've been in crypto since 2014.

I just had the California Franchise Tax Board literally steal money out of a bank account of mine without any warning or notice. They left $0.01 in there and charged a $125 fee. I found out today they are claiming I owe taxes from when I wasn't even living in the country (and I was paying taxes then too!). In 2021/2022, I paid more taxes than I ever have in my life. I even over paid just to make sure that I was fully covered, including additional property taxes now that I purchased a place. I'm not some crypto tax dodger at all, I pay more than my fair share because that is the right thing to do.

Today, I ended up going to my other bank and pulling all of my money out as cash (thankfully they picked the 'wrong' account!). I can't trust the system to not steal even more money from me. That's messed up. Because monday is a bank holiday, now I have to wait until tuesday until my accountant can deal with this bullshit. What kind of broken system is this?

Things like this really make me want to double down on crypto. Not your keys, not your coins is taking on a whole new meaning for me. It is easy to say "well, that's never happened to me. crypto is a waste. i have no use for this stuff", but if all it takes is some faceless government entity to wipe out your entire bank account without any notice... then obviously something is wrong with the system.

As for future employability... that's silly. Any place that wouldn't hire you because of where you worked in the past isn't a place you'd want to work at anyway. I hire people because they have the skills and attitude that I'm looking for.

> Today, I ended up going to my other bank and pulling all of my money out as cash. I can't trust the system to not steal even more money from me. That's messed up. Because monday is a bank holiday, now I have to wait until tuesday until my accountant can deal with this bullshit. What kind of broken system is this?

Same.

It's insane how little control and power you have as an average person. Your bank accounts can be frozen on a whimp, you can be put into a jail with no attorney because you cannot use your own money to pay for them and forced to confess to something you never did, then slave away for the state.

There are too many laws everywhere which means you've broken some. The only difference between you and the person who got caught is selective enforcement and someone wanting to make an example or fulfil their own goals.

And financial system will snitch on all of it.

You have no privacy. Is that not insane? You could be jailed for having a financial transactions on grindr in some countries in the world.

Countries impose financial and currency controls against the benefit of the people all the time.

It's not "freedom" if you cannot choose to take your money outside.

It's fucked up how normalised limiting freedom has become. You don't notice it. The state controls so much of your money forcefully with a threat of violence and isolation.

Your money that you work hard for, sweat for, break your bones for.

Yes. All of this is why "web3" is not bullshit and why I've dedicated years of my energy and my funds to it.

Try living in another country too, I have. Banking is the number one pain point. Even more than language issues. Ever tried to get your own money out of a western union in a country that doesn't speak your language?

If you're doubting "web3" then you've probably never experienced these sorts of pain yourself and I could understand your trepidation. But since I'm understanding you, how about understanding me too.

IMO, the term web3 is tainted by VCs using retail to dump their tokens faster than they can dump equity in traditional IPO which is less transparent to average schmuck because most of the money comes from the retirement funds passively investing in everything.

It's their shortcut to liquidity which resulted in overpromises and dumps.

It's not unreasonable for someone to be sceptical but to dismiss it all together is a mistake.

We need to go back to the core. Decentralized financial instruments built to help people prosper economicly. To uplift poor people in unbanked countries. To stop dictators from rugging poor people and investors. To provide individual freedom and highest level of personal attainment.

The yield bullshit needs to stop.

Edit: I don't mean all yield strategies, just ones which are unsustainable (most of them).

I want unsecured lending products in crypto based on on-chain reputation which happens automatically on taking small loans or doing a lot of transactions maybe endorsement system where institutions stake money in return of verification.

Banks won't provide loans to people who need them the most. Even self employment people and founders with millions of dollars in exit struggle with a home loan because banks refuse to deal with anyone who doesn't fit their cookie cutter.

I believe crypto has potential to disrupt it.

I love flash loans for this exact reason. They are unique to crypto, allowing freedom to anyone to increase market efficiency by taking advantage of arbitrage without creditionals and needing absurd amount of capital to start.

Certainly, the marketing around web3 went to shit. But I've been in it for 4 years now so I don't really care about the VC's because I see the larger picture already.

I agree with everything you said, but the end. The ponzi tokenomics definitely needs to stop, but the lego yield stuff has potential. It is more than just unbanked, it is people without lines of credit. It is teaching people how to be fiscally responsible.

Based on my Vietnam example below. Woman with gold teeth instead deposits her stable money into her phone. That money earns yield automatically. She can also use a portion of it as collateral for a Kiva-style loan to help with her farm crops (or whatever small business she has). People who buy her products effectively pay back her loan directly by submitting to her phone app. She's in control of it herself.

Banking is a solved problem, has been for decades. Seeking an alternative in technological complex solutions is running away from the actual problem.

An international swift transaction takes days or sometimes weeks to clear. In developing countries, bank will take its sweet time to clear it which may take even more than two weeks.

It costs tens of dollars in fees and significant percentage in currency conversion cost if you live in a country where you cannot hold foreign currency received directly (Many unbanked countries have these kind of absurd laws).

So you will lose hundreds of dollars on currency conversion on a transaction of a few thousand easily.

This is taking into account the best bank account you can get with high income. At best, you might end up paying tens of dollars on a few thousand transaction in conversion.

Solved problem? Not at all.

I can provide so many examples where banking is broken. People buy registered companies for a company bank account in middle East because you cannot easily open a bank account if you are a foreigner or foreign company. You need to have hundreds of thousands in seed capital to start a current account.

In developed countries, I have seen friends struggle with getting a home loan because they are self employed or founder.

Maybe you don't believe crypto is the solution and I can accept that but banking system is nowhere solved.

If banking was a solved problem, then how come so many people don’t have an account?

Because the problem isn't banking. There are lots of people who don't have access to clean water either. Doesn't mean we need new solutions to provide clean water, but rather we need to figure out why existing solutions don't always work.

> Doesn't mean we need new solutions to provide clean water, but rather we need to figure out why existing solutions don't always work.

Solution doesn't work, we need a new solution. It doesn't need to be 'new', it needs to be 'different'! Play on words, at the end of the day, people still don't have bank accounts or clean water. Something isn't working. I'd rather be part of the solution and not part of the problem, even if the solution isn't perfect.

It is also an apple/orange comparison. Water != Bank Account.

Because they have little to no money.

By that same logic, taxis were a solved problem and uber shouldn't exist, yet here we are today.

It doesn't matter how much money someone has.

Everyone has a right to have a safe place to store it.

> You have no privacy. Is that not insane? You could be jailed for having a financial transactions on grindr in some countries in the world.

That’s because privacy against the state is at odds with enforcing the state’s laws. From a state-centric perspective, money is “good citizen behaviour” points. If you maintain a job deemed valuable, the bank prints you money to buy a house, etc. You have to know what people used their money on to assess if that’s good behaviour or not.

That's why bitcoin and ethereum are so awesome. It gives this power back to the people and there is not a whole lot that governments can do about it except watch the flow of funds. Of course we can argue over finer details, but the overall course has been set. It is just a matter of innovation now.

Having the combination of bitcoin as the single limited entity (simple is valuable) and eth as the programmable, more complex version of that, solves a lot of general needs and provides a good foundation to build on.

Sure the on/off ramps make it easier to trace it to individuals, but what happens when people stop using those and just deal with each other directly? L2's will make the smaller day to day, transactions cheaper and faster and those will just roll up with checkpoints on the L1's.

DeFi is a bottom up step in that direction. To emulate the existing infrastructure, we need programmable money. It stumbled to begin with, but again the foundation has been laid. Cat is out of the bag, so to speak.

I’m not sure that I would want people to hold all of that power - there’a a reason that the state has a monopoly on violence in the first place - turns out that having people roam the streets with guns is a less pleasant reality to be in for most people (look at Russia in the 1990s for what that looks like).

Not to go all black-mirror, but imagine someone anonymously putting up a $X million dollar bounty on someone’s head, backed by a smart contract promise or something (I know that it can’t be guaranteed at present, but imagine). Or other nefarious things that most of the society considers harmful - and having no way to stop those from happening.

Same as the promise of “hard money” - look at the 1930s for what a deflationary bust with “hard money” looks like. There is a reason why we have the current system, and while there are large issues with it, Bitcoin/Crypto solves very few of them

> imagine someone anonymously putting up a $X million dollar bounty on someone’s head, backed by a smart contract promise or something (I know that it can’t be guaranteed at present, but imagine). Or other nefarious things that most of the society considers harmful - and having no way to stop those from happening.

With or without crypto, nothing prevents that from happening today. Number one currency for nefarious actions is (and likely will always be), USD. Likely perpetuated by the US govt itself.

> There is a reason why we have the current system, and while there are large issues with it, Bitcoin/Crypto solves very few of them

I don't think they are trying to solve for those issues though. I'm more than happy with the issues they do solve, for me, today. Namely, more control and flexibility over my own funds.

I can take any amount of my dollars in my bank, convert them to a decentralized stablecoin (and I'm not talking shit like UST), fly to another country, and then access those funds locally without anyone telling me what I can and cannot do.

If that means that others can do the same and they might use that to do something awful, it doesn't really matter to me because if they really wanted to get away with it in today's standards, they could. Jamal Khashoggi is a prime example of this.

> I can take any amount of my dollars in my bank, convert them to a decentralized stablecoin (and I'm not talking shit like UST), fly to another country, and then access those funds locally without anyone telling me what I can and cannot do.

That's like: https://xkcd.com/538/

Are we talking about 2k USDs or meaningful sums like 300k or 10 million? Because banks in many countries (e.g. mine) have outright ban transactions with BTC-related websites (e.g. crypto exchanges) using their accounts... So assuming you find someone who'll be able to verse 1 million USD to your account (can/will coinbase do that? not in theory, in practice... or ask you 15 days to put the money together?), you'll have to convince the bank to accept and hand you the money. Then explain where did these came from. Good luck with that.

If you're carrying cash into a country, it is very easy to lose it at the airport given that they are looking for people carrying a lot of cash and have machines to detect these things.

There are private OTC desks of all sizes, all over the place, if you know where to look.

I too had something like this happen. After a burnout and extensive travel I somehow got my whole account frozen and emptied just after I got back home.

I spend weeks begging friends to pay my bills (i.e. server bills, domains, ...) Because otherwise my business would have died because I couldn't pay for anything. It took several weeks until I had a cash flow established again.

In no world am I going to trust a bank with my active money anymore. I rather loose 50% within a week than everything within a day.

Edit:// or the one time I couldn't buy any food before Monday because I forgot (or rather didn't care) Thursday and Friday is a holiday and transferred money on Wednesday afternoon only to arrive on Monday at noon. And this is within the same bank!

Also: Imagine doing international business like a SaaS in a Industrie Visa/MasterCard doesn't allow. Without crypto I would be having 50 PayPal (Payeer, PM, ...) like accounts from several countries and fees multiplying all over.

Edit2:// Or when I was living abroad but couldn't open a bank account because I also live in Switzerland and EU banks are afraid of money laundering so much that they simply refuse to open an account for someone that could 'launder so easy'. Even thought I do have an EU passport, and a legit business.

Had similar experience when I was out working in Berlin. I had a gym membership in one part of the city (paid up 12 months in advance in cash). Moved to a different part of the city and didn't go back. Fast forward about six months, two bald headed goons came knocking at my old address looking for me, with a 1850 euro bill.

Gym membership for the next year plus a 900 euro service charge because I hadn't written a letter starting my intention not to renew by 90 days of the time of an automatic roll over.

Luckily for me, the Aussie guy staying in my old place told them I'd moved into a squat and they'd have to serve notice on two dozen angry punks if they wanted their money. Never heard from them again.

But I was lucky, if I'd given them a bank account the full amount would have been charged straight away, with no comeback or way to get my money back for a service I didn't use, and the bank would be absolutely fine with that. Shortly after I moved much of my funds into crypto, and would do it again for the security from arbitrary seizure.

If it makes you feel better: most gyms are a scam. The whole business model is about selling as much memberships as possible, and making it hard to cancel. Most gyms sell much more memberships than they could even remotely facilitate, because they know ~80% of the members never return after the first month or so.

I used to work at a small gym that could handle maybe 100 visitors a day, I think they had over 8000 paying members. You could only cancel by letter 1 month in advance of the renewal date. The only exception was a doctor's letter for some medical reason you could no longer go to the gym. The owner drove a Ferrari (albeit second hand).

Every year on January, after people had been over-consuming food and had ambitious new year resolutions, they'd do all sorts of promotions, and they would sell for about a years worth of new subscriptions in a day. I'd estimate 90% of those 'januaries' (as they'd call them) no longer returned after the first month. About 75% forgot to cancel in December, so they would be charged again for a full year, though they hadn't visited in 11 months.

This is a common 'exploit' of human behaviour. People feel good about taking the first step in weight loss by buying the membership. But when you think about it, it makes no sense at all why you'd need a 'membership' the gain access to a gym.

This is also why home training devices are a big business, and why they usually come with terrible return policies.

> if I'd given them a bank account the full amount would have been charged straight away, with no comeback

Can they do that in Germany? In the Netherlands you can revert such "charge" transactions ("incasso") up to 13 months after they happen. Also, over here every subscription becomes monthly cancelable after the first year.

> you can revert such "charge" transactions ("incasso") up to 13 months after they happen.

You probably need a reason to revert them?

Up til 8 weeks the bank will just carry out the reversal without asking any questions. This is done by just pressing a button in your banking app.

After 8 weeks have passed you will indeed need to supply a reason.

but that won't save you from anything- you will get sued or dragged to debt collection

> Shortly after I moved much of my funds into crypto, and would do it again for the security from arbitrary seizure.

I don't think they would've been able to seize the money. But in any case your approach doesn't work, you still owe that money. Automatic renewals is a scummy practice but if they do have a legal claim you won't get out of it by being hard to find and keeping your money in crypto.

Probably best to treat it as an expensive lesson and remember to close your subscriptions in the future.

Exhibit A of why predatory consumer practices work.

You'd rather be civil, than treated civilly.

The practices need regulatory action to fight against. Germany got recently some legislated improvements like automatic renewals being cancellable with a one month notice period. Not sure if that applies to gyms too, but I certainly hope so.

> because I hadn't written a letter starting my intention not to renew by 90 days of the time of an automatic roll over.

No, it's because you signed a contract (scammy or not) and didn't follow its terms. You wouldn't want someone to do that to a service you provide.

There are a lot of stories like this. There are also a lot of unbanked people (1.7 billion worldwide). People who fail to see the value in Bitcoin/crypto often are not aware of those very real problems people are facing. Traditional banking is great so long as you are on the happy path.

In northern Vietnam, where I've done extensive travel, to this day, women store their meager wealth in gold fillings because that is the only place where they can put it and not have it stolen from them. There is no bank where they can deposit funds and even if there was, the Vietnam govt's version of FDIC is like $2k.

Amazingly, they also have smart phones and the government has put 4G towers through the whole country and in the most remote places.

That's our usecase right there.

North Vietnam is also where people earn the equivalent of $30 a month and can't afford to HODL until the next price spike, as well as not having many crypto on/off ramps for the unbanked.

Frankly, the enthusiasm some wealthy Westerners have for dumping newly printed gambling tokens on some of the world's poorest people is part of the cause of the anti-crypto backlash the OP describes.

They are already gambling on gold.

Sure, but for all its flaws, gold is a 5000 year old store of wealth with some use in dentistry that doesnt lose most of its value on a regular basis, not a pump and dump scheme whose wealthy foreign speculators need bagholders who havent bored of hearing about its future as global currency to bail out their artificial asset's latest collapse.

"Sure but". Look at the last 100 years of the value of gold. The value has gone all over the place, with many crashes. It isn't as stable as you think.

All it takes is one single "discovery" of a massive cache of gold. That cache is then controlled by the government who's land it is found on. It is one of the most heavily manipulated forms of 'money' on the planet.

It might be good enough for you, but as the person who started this thread, I'm clearly in the camp of less government control over my funds... No, thanks.

Excuse me. When did I say gold was good? I said it wasn't as abominably bad as cryptocurrency, which doesn't need something as unlikely as a discovery of a massive cache of gold to wipe out poor people's meagre fortunes and is the most heavily manipulated form of money on the planet.

It's like concluding that as poor Vietnamese people already smoke (the men generally do...) in lieu of better forms of entertainment, what would really improve their lives is some crystal meth.

100% true. Awful elitism.

Being in Vietnam i can attest the gap, and the gap also exists within the country. It isn't unusual to see customers at Starbucks opening their wallet to show they filled all the debit card pockets in full.

The population has an instinctive distrust for centralised authorities for the most part. Although very patriotic, they wouldn't place their life's worth of wealth in any of the several government controlled banks. Nor to the more independent or even foreign banks either. And it's good that way, Vietnam has a thriving crypto scene and may very well be one of top adopters of crypto. For what business use case they don't know quite yet, but it will come.

Same is true for Bangladesh, India, Philippines, etc. They all have good Internet connectivity but too many unbanked people.

Mobile wallets are quite popular for the unbanked in those countries. You don’t need a decentralised ledger for that.

Your reasoning is something like: problem unbanked people, solution crypto. I don't understand that reasoning at all. Why not look at solutions that have actually proven to work first? Why not investigate the problem and figure out what their needs actually are?

> Why not look at solutions that have actually proven to work first?

Power structures are ending cash in various places for various reasons, and we need some even kind of private digital replacement to cash.

> the Vietnam govt's version of FDIC is like $2k.

So, like 8 years salary? That's significantly better than in the USA, I don't think it's making the point that you think it is.

Do the phones get stolen?

They do, but such event is rather considered the victim's fault for being a careless idiot. Stealing a phone isn't more an act of selfish robbery than a merciless lesson for those who don't keep valuable items safe. Better the phone than the house!

1.7 billion unbanked people for what reason? a software engineer in Sweden is not the same as a farmer in Bangladesh or a goldsmith in Syria.

Crypto is also great as long as it is great...

Crypto is one of many solutions for this problem. I'm willing to argue that out of 10 possible solutions, the crypto solution is the worst of all. Simply because the law is the law, and crypto might make it harder to enforce the law, it doesn't _change_ the law. So even with your crypto solution, you still would owe money to the California Franchise Tax Board, whether you like or not.

To be fair, it's a lot easier to deal with tax board says you owe $X but can't physically take anything, so you get a chance to make your case before actually handing it over, than tax board says you owe $X and just grabbed it out of your account without even warning you, you can try to contest it after but you'll be broke while you do.

Possession is 9/10 of the law. What some tax board thinks only matters insofar as they are able to enforce their will. People think governments are omnipotent. They are not.

Read what I wrote. I paid my taxes. I paid what I owed. I am almost 50 and never had an issue with taxes in my lifetime. They still emptied my account with no notification.

I never thought that would happen to me.

Why do you think the FTB took money from your account? Do you think you had unpaid taxes/etc.? You must have some intuition about it (e.g. previous notices?), and I'd love to hear more. Thanks.

I feel like it's a bit naive to expect that the crypto world can evade the authorities forever. You need a registered office and executives and lawyers to run any big company, and thus the authorities and laws have a way in. The laws governing the existing banking system are not an intrinsic property, the crypto world will have the same laws eventually, just on a slightly different technical platform.

Not evade. Just give me control of my own funds such that nobody can just empty my account without at least giving me notice first. As you can imagine, that is a quite disturbing and disruptive event.

I do understand you feelings, but I don't see how that's a technical problem. That's an entirely legal problem. The law could easily mandate that feature to any cryptocurrency which doesn't want to go to the underground, or remove that feature from regular banking.

How is law not technical?

Law does not follow physics, it's a purely human invention. But I'm not sure how that's relevant to the discussion?

Yah bc when you get scammed in crypto no one can get your money back! Lmao.

Agreed. Wallet security needs to improve.

That said, my company was recently scammed with a phishing attack where we were sent an invoice from one of our vendors. Someone had hacked the vendors accounting firm and we paid it to an different account number, get this… in the same bank. So, scammers were able to create an account, with kyc in the same bank. Crazy.

We are struggling to get the money back now.

Use an escrow? It's pretty simple to build reversible transactions for an erc 20 token on EVM.

Obviously you would introduce a centralized arbitrator. It's a solved problem in crypto except nobody uses it.

I can only speak for myself, but even though I am very skeptical of DeFi and crypto, I don't look down my nose at people simply because they see it differently. I do look down my nose at people who are deliberately running scams, but it doesn't sound like you're doing that.

I think there's a dark side to most things, and that in the beginning it's not easy to see what it is. For example, I think that social media can be destructive to society and to individual people in a variety of ways that weren't at all obvious to me when I was younger. I don't think it was bad to believe in it, though -- it did, in fact, make the internet useful and accessible to way more people, and that's probably a good thing in the long run, even with all the problems that come with that.

In the worst case, you'd have to tell a future employer, "I went to work in DeFi because I believed in the potential of the underlying technology, but [IT DIDN'T WORK OUT || I DON'T BELIEVE IN IT ANYMORE] and now I'm ready to move on." That sounds pretty reasonable to me?

I think you should get out. We are at a critical point now where the criticism for crypto has hit the mainstream, and over the last market cycle that criticism was proven to be true: that crypto is largely predatory in nature and has few if any real world applications has been proven out. Maybe your project is different, but the industry works in some pretty dark ways.

There are lots of informed crypto skeptics that understand finance, economics, and distributed systems enough to know that crypto is not going to work as it's sold to retail investors, and their voices grow louder everyday. Plenty of these critics, like myself, have experience working on crypto projects or have a background in SWE, distributed systems, and VC funded start ups. Working on crypto in 2016 is a much different ethical dilemma than working in the space in 2021, or even 2023. We simply know more, and right now we're watching the bodies rack up as the market experiences cascade failures.

Of course, if you 100% believe in a technology and think it has a future, then by all means keep working in that space. However, leaving is not impossible. There's such a need for senior devs that working on un-ethical projects isn't an unsurmountable goal.

Working in an industry that is considered shady can harm you in the long run. I have worked at one point in a gambling (So called "Gaming") company and 80% of the people there only move to other gambling companies (or even shadier places) because there is a bias against them in "regular" companies. I would also add that the longer they stay in the space the harder it is to leave it without a significant pay cut / position downgrade.

This is not only limited to developers but marketing, hr and product as well.

Fields that I would especially be wary of entering or spending time in are:

* Gambling: Including real gambling ,virtual points gambling and gatcha games

* Gambling disguised as financial services: Gamifying Forex/Binary options and other "investments"

* Predatory financial services: Like payday loans and high yield loans

* Areas that you need to explain why your specific company is not a scam: Crypto/NTF etc

* Actual scams: Like toolbars (you would be surprised but its still a thing) and anything that is just thinly veiled phishing

The same advice goes to entrepreneurs and not just employees. I would advise to stay away from VCs that have any significant amount of investment in these fields (>10% of portfolio).

The adult industry is another one that where I've heard a stigma exists. Saying you work for a premier streaming video platform with hard latency or caching characteristics sounds interesting until the interviewer asks the question and you feel compelled to be transparent and answer the NSFW domain name of the company or even just the industry.

Would that stigma be higher in certain cultures/countries? I feel like it would be lower where I’m from (a liberal European country).

It might offend some people, but I’d guess not most.

Az16

This is a tough one.

I wouldn't worry that much about employability. If you're honest, hardworking, and love writing software then I don't see any issues there. I'm sure you've solved enough hard interesting problems that'll carry over to other industries. It's all about moving bits anyway. You'll even have a leg up if you have a better than average understanding of security.

You may be holding yourself back because it does take some time to ramp up in a new "vertical" (so to speak). Building new professional connections, etc. So like... maybe in an alternate universe you'd be working your way up the ladder at Apple or Google or whatever. That time invested does pay off and there's an opportunity cost there.

The tough one is the ethical question. Sometimes it's hard to tell if our disillusionment is internal or external. In other words, is it nagging you because you can see why the public is negative towards crypto or is it nagging you because you don't want to alienate yourself from the crowd?

If it helps, I've long held the strong belief that I should wake up in the morning guilt-free about my job. I need to feel excited about coming in to work and tackling the next big problem. I refuse to work for or with jerks. I refuse to work on products that aren't striving to make things better. I refuse to work on exploitative or manipulative products. I refuse to work for unfairly low pay. And all of that positive energy (great product, great people, great mission, good/great pay) make the dark/hard times easier to manage.

In the long run I feel like this philosophy has made me a happier and more successful engineer.

EDIT: Just to give you an idea of how I applied the above philosophy. I once quit a well paying job in the very first month because a senior engineer was an insanely venomous person and no one seemed interested in stopping them. I didn't make a big stink about it, just quietly moved on. The next job I found was amazing and I'm so glad that I did what I did. Yes it was scary.

Employability can take a hit if the company you work for gets hacked or rug pulls, which sucks, as employees are victims in that context also, but I know a dev who finds himself a tad radioactive due to this.

That said, we're in a far smaller market. I've suggested he look for full time remote work for overseas companies instead.

> Anyone else in a similar position?

Yes.

I’ve worked in fintech and recently transitioned to cryptocurrencies (implementing cryptography). The backlash I received from my peers for even going into finance was very comparable.

> the constant backlash from the public is nagging me

I’ve lost friends, and I’ve resorted to say that I work with cryptography (which is 100% true, but omits the application).

It feels like you need to either double down on your beliefs or selectively inform people what you do for a living, to keep working with crypto.

It’s hard to be a conscientious cypherpunk when you see how average people will bend towards being cheated by stonks.

Since people’s judgement matters to you, consider working with something that you’re proud to tell people. That’s part of why I quit my first job in finance.

When friends of friends ask for investment advice, I don’t get back to them; it feels like selling people drugs. I don’t mind that they invest, but I spent years understanding the landscape, and I avoid most of what I see, including NFTs.

> will I be unemployable

Yes, your skills and personality will get you another job. Presumably, the technical level of your current job is the best you’ve done so far.

If you’re reading Hacker News, you’re over-exposed to the criticism. In reality, people don’t think that much about it.

Personally I would be hesitant to hire someone who worked in crypto. I feel it is a sign of bad judgement and morals.

I'm wondering if there is anyone working at GAMMA (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon) who also worries about the "constant backlash from the public" and if they feel bad about all the abuses their employers make, or if they just laugh all the way to the bank and get to develop a conscience when their companies face financial trouble.

Nah, who am I kidding? Who cares about the evil stuff done by BigTech? The money is so good it can buy them all the therapy they need.

I don't work for any of these companies, and I wanted to do so in the past, but not anymore. Maybe Microsoft is an exception, and that's open to change. I personally do care about the "evil" stuff they do, especially when it comes to privacy and monopolistic practices, but I would never attack or shame anyone for working their, everyone makes their own choice.

The "evil" things done by Big Tech are possible because of the people working there.

No matter how "well-intentioned" they are, if their cushy jobs with high compensation salaries are only possible because of the lucrative "evil" things done by the company, they deserve as much scorn as their bosses.

By extension what do you think about people living comfortably in the United States and benefiting economically (and indirectly helping prop) the military industrial complex?

Do you choose where you live (and where to pay taxes) like you choose where/how you work?

Good point.

Definitely not to the same degree. But to some small degree, you can choose to move.

You can also chose to vote a certain way. Although with a 2 party system, especially when both seem to support the military industrial complex, you don’t really have an alternative.

Sorry for the tangent: are most Americans content with a 2 party system? From the outside it feels so dysfunctional and divisive. (and, dare i say it, undemocratic)

I am not American, though I lived there. All I can say is that this polarization is a XXI century thing. People used to look at the parties less like part of their identities and more like something that a choice of values and trade-offs.

Anyway, I think that this has little to do with the main point. Left or right, the main issue is that the idea of "The Corporation" has helped tremendously to improve productivity, but it is used as a moral shield by individuals to justify their acts. No matter how high in the ladder someone is, as long as they want to go up, they are all complicit.

If you work on improving security on a big tech product are you "evil"? If you work on education programs for these companies, are you evil?

It is a big generalization to say everyone who works for these companies is contributing to it's evil. Most people are actually trying to make improvements for users.

If you wouldn't do the work without the paycheck from the evil corp, you are complicit into the evil doings.

I'm almost certain I could get a job at Facebook and make some good cash but I don't for these exact reasons.

Don’t worry about what the public thinks. Does your work align with your values? Do you feel it’s ethical and doesn’t take advantage of people?

The public morality once thought it was unethical to help humans escape slavery. It is not a good barometer, especially when the tide against crypto has turned strictly because it stopped making speculators and scammers cash.

In my social circles, there has been intense negative sentiment against crypto consistently since 2016. Is there really a “turning tide”?

It depends on the society. In my social circles, literally every single person around me praised crypto almost religiously, for years.

Well, given that quite a few people lot quite a lot of value with crypto in the past 6 months, I’d say that’s a turning tide.

No. If anything it is getting worse. Previously not many people knew much about crypto to care. Now plenty do.

I work in DeFi development as well and I can feel your pain.

Two things that I have to constantly keep in mind:

1. I have worked in stock markets for years before crypto and felt the same: I have been criticized in a similar fashion by laymen who don't necessarily have the proper understanding of what a stock market is and what value does it bring to the society. And yes, people who lost money were of course the most vocal.

2. Someone recently wrote: "99% of DeFi is scam. The rest is the future of finances". I strongly believe that idea, albeit I'd say the ratio is different.

---

One of the important things that is going to legitimize DeFi is deeper connection between DeFi protocols and real world use cases. One such example was for me when I fell on hard times and had to borrow on Aave to provide for the family. I had money available for me at a rate much lower than the bank, momentarily and with none of of the typical impossible soul-crunching KYC/AML bs. I recovered and paid back. I was happy. The lender was happy. Aave was happy. Stakers in Aave were happy. Absolute win-win all around. How is that not the future?

---

Oh, and don't work for scam projects.

I can also ride a car without a seatbelt and ignore the soul crushing speed limits and it'll be way better for me to get places faster. How is that not the future?

Taking an existing process and removing safeguards that were added over time for good reason doesn't make something the future unless you can prevent the original problem in a new better way. If your solution is to just ignore the problem exists, it's hard to call it the future.

Good point.

I can easily argument both for regulations in DeFi and against. I see it strong for both sides and I'm not sure what way is the right way.

PS: Regulation of DeFi is close to impossible, so the question is moot anyway.

This is close to the speed vs time argument that does go into city and highway speed limits.

Notice how no nation caps their speed limit closer to a 0 fatality level?

Most or all developed nations require strict and improving designs to new cars to help with safety. Better example IMO.

But...we only got to the point that the industry can afford to integrate those features because of mass economies of scale — which came from the tradeoff I'm referring to..

> One such example was for me when I fell on hard times and had to borrow on Aave to provide for the family

Can you explain how that worked? Aave loans are overcollateralized, so doesn't that mean you actually had capital available? That seems very different from a regular loan where you don't need liquid collateral since it's tied to your identity / credit score.

Yep, I had some bitcoins to put up as collateral. Didn't want to sell it.

Re: regular loan: see, I live in a country other than the US.

"I have assets but I don't want to sell them" is very different from "I need a loan to provide for my family" - the latter is what banks typically provide, U.S. or not, while the former is just a financial instrument to manage exposure.

You didn't have hard times, BTC is quite liquid, you just wanted to keep the exposure.

> banks typically provide, U.S. or not

or not. Very much not. So DeFi protocols were my only option.

> you just wanted to keep the exposure

Correct.

I work for crypto industry too.

Welcome people's ideas, but pass them through your filter and do what you feel is right, not what people think.

If you believe crypto is good and love working for it, keep on.

If you don't believe so, and have a good alternative to switch, do it.

Just don't make a decision because the people around you tell you so.

Not only about crypto but pretty much applies everything in life.

Sometime in 2013 I was doubting to work with crypto. What made it clear for me, and this is the advice I still give friends today:

Ask yourself this. Regardless of wether crypto pricing goes up or down, regardless of wether there is major adoption or not. Will I get satisfaction from having built X? Will I look back after a decade and be grateful about my contribution?

So far, for me, the answer has been a no. I haven’t seen a use-case in crypto that excites me and is worth working on. The money would have been nice, but I’m in a luxury position where I’d rather spend my time working on useful things.

But again, that’s just my personal position and I accept that everyone is different.

Who has the luxury to work on something that fulfils those criteria? If I would follow your advice I would be homeless.

I would say there are plenty of things I could work on that would give me satisfaction. It doesn’t necessarily have to be curing cancer or solving world hunger.

A crud app that solves the need of small business. A tool to help students learn. An app to help people travel. In my eyes the list of things worth doing is endless.

Since we’re talking about working in crypto, I assume you are a software programmer (or product, design, marketing, ..). Skills that I’m sure are also sought after in the above mentioned endeavors.

Senior developers have that luxury. Healthcare adjacent tech is always hiring, and you can actually save lives there - not just make a bunch of crypto andys rich while destroying the planet

Two things:

1. Yes, healthcare was the only thing I could think of that would qualify for me personally. Pretty sure I've never seen a job like that in my area though.

2. Is "Andy" an actual concept outside the Ice Poseidon community? I wonder if people realize where it comes from and how toxic/racist it is. It basically started with Andy Milonakis being on Ice Poseidon's stream and then every non-white person who joined would be called stuff like Mexican Andy, Asian Andy etc.

I have zero idea what the ice poseidon community is. I always presumed it comes from Toy Story, with Andy being the annoying cowboy

Pretty sure it comes from Ice Poseidon but could be wrong: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/andy-slang

Healthcare isn't about saving lives. It's about making money. Medical devices, pharmaceuticals, children's hospitals, medical schools, all of it.

I suppose you can say that some healthcare is about doing good and/or providing a necessary service. Smile Train, Doctors Without Borders, national healthcare systems, etc. But all of these are subsidized with money from capitalism or tax revenue, and they's evaporate overnight if they were unfunded.

I recently was in the same position. Went from curious to skeptical to disgusted by the whole crypto/web3 space.

The turning point was seeing my name on the company website, I was embarrassed for myself. Was an easy decision to quit.

When you left did you ask to have your name removed?

I’m not in your position but can understand your concern. At the end of the day there is an enormous shortage of developers with good skills, and if you’ve spend your cruft in understanding the systems and all the insights that come with it, than they’d be rather easily transferred into others. Not knowing in what part of the system you’re involved, but given the presence on this forum I can only imagine you’re involved from a technical pov.

Back end engineers and data engineers are very much sought after and the distributed nature of tokens in general give raise to a large set of interesting problems, that in my opinion are some times better solved without involvement of the blockchain. But a lot of other concepts do still hold.

Seniority and being a good team member are also invaluable and hard to find, and something that doesn’t matter what technical skill you’re involved with.

So in short I wouldn’t think to much on the fact that you spend time in crypto, but rather spend the time thinking on what concepts and systems are transferrable to other domains and roles and have it be reflected in your resume and cv accordingly. Being a good team member is much more than technicals. You’re a human in a team with insights and knowledge.

> However, the constant backlash from the public is nagging me.

There isn't a constant backlash from the public - most people don't care, the ones that like it buy and the ones that don't write grumpy blog posts about it. The people who do care have split into the aye and nay camps and are arguing the situation out. The usual anti-capitalist types will hate it, but they hate everything financial.

Although any specific crypto is probably a mad idea that will eventually go bust, it is pretty clear at this point that the industry as a whole is here to stay. It has been more than a decade now, it is hard to come up with a scenario where all the money goes away.

Eventually the "industry" will burn through the available pool of gullible "investors" who can be suckered into giving up their money. New suckers are born every minute, of course, but they won't be enough to keep the crypto industry above the background noise of regular frauds and scams.

This is assuming that nothing productive comes out of crypto. If it starts turning a profit then new entrants aren't required.

Let me interject with a related issue I've seen in HN and its "Who's hiring" posts. I'm tired of having to waddle through the crypto/blockchain/web3 offers that are seemingly and permanently 6 months away from solving most of humanities issues. Most of them are grifters and they should not be rewarded with visibility in this forum.

It's an open hiring board. Who is going to fairly judge the openings without falling into some sort of bias?

Actually I can barely find any crypto posts on the hiring threads. Maybe 5%.

Zoom and Netflix both lost 60-80% of their value in the last year and I don't see anyone declaring them dead. I don't work in crypto but I think there's a bit of a knee jerk reaction to seeing all the vaporware projects being wiped out (rightfully so). Consolidation and pruning of wasteful projects is good. If you feel like the work you're personally doing is positive, then don't worry about people dancing on the graves of LUNA and Celsius. ETH is still a legitimate technology with real use cases.

> ETH is still a legitimate technology with real use cases.

what would be an example of a real use-case that ETH does well? The core promise of ETH is smart contracts and that code is somehow "law". But that got exposed for the idiotic reasoning that it was and went out of the window when they had to hard-fork in 2017.

No matter what they did since then to improve the old pre-2017 ETH nobody can tell me that bugs don't happen and if they do on this scale then human intervention in inevitable. This is however contra the promise that everything is decentralized by design and not under control of a single actor. Then there are the countless promises about its potential driven up by Gavin Wood & Vitalik Buterin that in hindsight look just like stalling for more time to ensure further funding rounds.

Woods & Buterin are both scammers that extracted millions from their mark. And they were able to do so because they have the technical background to pull it off and are also slightly smarter than the average mobbed-up shit-coin peddler like Dr. Ruja Ignatova or that Australian Satoshi-cosplaying clown Craig Wright.

ETH maybe hasn't been exposed as a scam yet but it is still an example of "fake it till you make it" at all cost and is in the same territorry as "Theranos", "Inventing Anna" - a series of broken promises, stalling techniques for more funding and lost egos of the founders who think of themselves as too big to fail.

> This is however contra the promise that everything is decentralized by design and not under control of a single actor

This is still decentralized because people need to coordinate to make a change. Decentralisation doesn't mean a system without human deciding what happens. It just means decentralisation of the power between the participants and ability to enter the room without creditionalism.

But it demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that code is not law since they breached that law with the hard fork.

That’s more of a demonstration that code is law but laws can change by the consensus of the participants, measured transparently and verifiable by their willingness to mine the fork.

That was the system working as intended, even if not everyone in the community agrees with it.

I'd say it was more like committing secrets Into an early alpha repo... understandable at that stage of the project, likely never to be repeated.

> nobody can tell me that bugs don't happen

They do happen. And whenever someone does make use of them, that's considered unlawful - which is absurd considering that the bug is part of the code and thus part of the law.

cross border multi currency accounts and transfers

ETH has been a legitimate technology with real use cases for a decade now and all we’ve got is jpeg’s of apes. With the amount of real money, talent and hard work being pumped into this space we should have seen the use cases materialize by now. But there’s nothing. I’m sure someone uses it for something real, but I haven’t seen crypto actually solve a real problem any better than a plain old database. Please correct me if I’m wrong,

It's an alternative financial system with many of the same (and some different) primitives than the existing ones: Liquidity via AMMs (instead of human or HFT MMs), derivatives, loans, yields, fixed-rate instruments, etc. These are used in the same way the equivalents in TradFi are used, just implemented differently, permissionless and with an API.

I believe that many people don't understand the traditional financial world or how any of the above are useful. They want to see something like Twitter on the Blockchain because that's what they can wrap their head around. That's why so many people in the crypto space come from a more traditional finance background. They understand how the above instruments are crucial for an economy even though they are not end-user products like Twitter is. They are one layer below that.

Also, the decade argument is misleading in the case of Ethereum. It's true that ETH itself has been around for a while, but DeFi with sufficient liquidity has really only been a thing for 2-3 years and has made quite rapid progress since then.

I understand it's an alternative, but if you can't explain why it's a better alternative, than it's just making simple things complex. You argue that people who ask for practical use cases don't understand because "they can't wrap their heads around it". I'd argue exactly the opposite: you're in too deep to understand that the burden of proof is on you (or anyone else in crypto), not on everyone else, and you can't wrap your around the fact that everything related to finance is lubricant for life. How is crypto better lubricant than the current financial system? That's a very valid question, and if takes your more than two sentences and all kinds of words that no one outside of crypto understands, I'm afraid you don't have an answer at all.

> How is crypto better lubricant than the current financial system?

That's easier to answer, but it's not what's usually asked. The OP asked "what's the use case of crypto" which is kind of like asking "what is the use case of financial instruments" and that's pretty difficult to explain to someone who has zero background in finance.

So why is a financial ecosystem based on crypto better? It's permissionless and makes the same services globally accessible to anyone in the world. It can to move and evolve faster because everything comes with open composable APIs allowing developers to implement new ideas quickly. It can be significantly cheaper due to eliminating middleman, which is already happening with AMMs that have liquidity and volume comparable to centralized counterparts. It's transparent in that you can see the current state of the market (e.g. collateralization ratios) and protect yourself accordingly. And it can protect you from bad centralized actors that manipulate monetary policy for their own benefit.

These are pretty convincing pros for me. Of course they also come with cons. If anyone can create financial instruments by copying & pasting a token template you'll end up with tons of scams. If you need distributed consensus to make decisions things move more slowly. For some people the cons will outweigh the pros. But there aren't many "consumer use cases" like Twitter on a blockchain that are easy to explain because it's fundamentally a financial infrastructure layer.

All of those things are contingent on perfect scenarios. As in, bug free contracts; which not to even mention the human willful engineering part of manipulating trust. Many people confuse permission and trust.

The things you outline are optimistic visions for what cryptocurrencies can offer as an alternative to the "root" financial system; however it is certainly not better in every case, and only maybe better in some very specific cases. Perhaps this will change overtime, but one thing I know for sure.... every piece of software ever written and every piece of hardware ever built has bugs and has been hacked. The human is even weaker to exploitation, so... without middle-men to act as a safety net, lawlessness and ill incentive can run rampant. Unfortunately the human condition optimizes for this opportunity if it shows itself.

You do admit there are cons, and I appreciate that. I think anyone who has some technical know-how should do what they can to at least point out any dogma. Dogma has clearly ruined a lot of the cool things about the technology.

You've essentially responded with the statement that all software has bugs: "every piece of software ever written and every piece of hardware ever built has bugs and has been hacked".

The person you're responding to provided a number of cogent points. To take the bad faith interpretation of your argument we'd never use computers or online banking.

They break. Humans fix it. Nobody can fix broken hacked contracts and act as intermediaries to solve issue. 3 party responsibility is key for stability.

>They understand how the above instruments are crucial for an economy even though they are not end-user products like Twitter is.

Do they actually know these instruments are crucial for the economy or do they just know how to make money with it? I'd think the latter would be enough.

Can you recommmend any resources to understand the importance of financial instruments to the economy?

>Do they actually know these instruments are crucial for the economy or do they just know how to make money with it? I'd think the latter would be enough.

There is no difference in capitalism between something being "crucial" for economy or just a way "to make money." They are equivalent.

That's hard for me to understand. I'd take 'crucial to the enconomy' to mean 'positively coupled to the rest of the economy' or 'the rest of the economy would be worse off/less efficient if this financial instrument were to be outlawed.

Why does this follow from 'makes a lot of money'? That seems like a very complicated question to me.

I was trying to say that these are equivalent, crucial to economy and way to make money. To me they are equivalent because capitalism will find the shortest and most efficient path, if it doesn't make money it will not exist. Hence, crucial means survives by making money.

Most relationships in capitalism are symbiotic, yes, but just like the natural world, predatory and even parasitic relationships abound as well.

The fiat financial system works because all the financial engineering is underlying the real capital economy.

Ethereum has the financialization but not a real capital economy -- no one starts a non-cryptoc biz with Ethereum.

So, all the defi stuff only works when its bridged to the fiat money world, but that bridge is so full of scams and speculative bubbles that it's useless for legit work.

IPFS and Internet Computer are the bests idea for a real economy on the blockchain money. But anything non-computational, like physical manufacturing and offline services, are much harder to connect to cryptoc.

ETH launched in 2015, which is 7 years ago, and has been working through fundamental limitations of the technology, building out the technological primitives that will enable mass-consumer blockchain applications in the future.

A list of areas where Ethereum has made huge progress:

* building secure smart contracts - more sophisticated auditing programmes by more experienced companies, improvements in programming languages, including Solidity, and improvements in formal verification techiques, have reduced the prevalence of major hacks of blue chip smart contracts significantly since 2015

* enabling privacy with public validation. Zk-SNARK and other zkp based mixers have gone from theory to reality with the launches of Tornado Cash, the AZTEC Network, and CAPE.

* Protocol fine-tuning, like the implementation of EIP1559, to improve fee predictability

* The creation of a Proof of Stake consensus protocol that maintains the same decentralization of Proof of Work, while providing a given level of security at a much lower economic cost

* Scalability technologies like Optimistic and ZK-Rollups

* Protocol upgrades like sharding to expand the capabilities of Rollups

These all took time to build, and will take more time still to reach production quality, but are shaping up to provide a vastly more useful blockchain platform than what was launched in 2015.

Your bullet points list a bunch of navel-gazing crypto improvements for crypto, but the previous poster was asking for examples where "crypto actually solve[a] a real problem any better than a plain old database". Got any?

Be your own bank cannot be solved by a plain database, as it doesn't ship with the trustless features most blockchain networks offer. The network is there. When bitcoin came out it solved that problem but the network took years to expand enough to guarantee integrity.

That's what has been happening in crypto, in the early years, network expansion, fed by speculative investment (speculation can have its merit, see).

Then came more elaborated DeFI and non DeFI supporting techs. (Smart contract, faster and cheaper blocks networks for micro transactions, anonymity/privacy networks etc).

Yes, business use cases continue to lag, but in a decade the progress is to me so astonishing, not so disappointing.

Perhaps worth mentioning, the traditional system via, via regulators working for we know who, and massive media fear mongering is not to be ignored, the injustice will lose in the long run, but it's pretty clear it has contributed to limit adoption, hence the emergence of more concrete, useful to socity use cases, other than auto generated Punk Monkeys for degenerated moneybgrabbers.

What problem does being your own bank solve? You're posing crypto as a solution to crypto-defined problems that no one actually has. How does crypto improve my life? How will it make me happier, healthier and how will it help me contribute more to the wellbeing of others and the planet? I can easily answer this question for PostgreSQL.

Well over 1B people remains unbanked, either excluded from banking or due to non intentional accessibility issues. That alone means crypto may be a solution to a signicant issue so many are having. Would that be enough?

Even among the banked, and in the very developed world, the traditional system has caused the loss of people' life long savings, loss of the ability to even continue business operations, that day someone in a centralised office decided it was OK to unilateraly freeze their accounts without notice (the many reporting their anecdotes but somehow rarely making mainstream news), or even the sudden withdrawal of the funds for dubious or faulty reasons (Greece, and other countries which faced economical turmoils and saw even democratically elected administrations basically steal people's money to recover from their own mismanagement flaws).

If you aren't impacted by any of the freedom and justice proven serious freedom and justice infringements listed above, which sometimes put people in life threatening positions, at least of financial tremendous distress, then Good for you! If you don't see any benefit in adopting blockchain technologies in your day to day life, fine! It will come around. And for now, billions would disagree with your perspective.

On PostgresQL, amazing solution,my favorite RDBS I think. Worth pointing out the main original author of this software was/is a hero in the fight against system oppression, he would probably have to say that PostgressQL is a beautiful solution for what it solves, and that blockchain is a revolution pending to solve many other issues, if only he could have access to this thread and not be inhumainly restrained in jail for many years with very questionable treatment, decided by the same clique of tyrants who sold us the banking system we still have today.

> the main original author of this software was/is a hero in the fight against system oppression

...is this a reference to Assange? IIRC, his contributions were ~0.7% of the commits in 1996, focused on psql and libpq. Promoting him to "main original author" is quite a leap.

My mistake, not the main contributor or orignal author, just a mere contributor. Assange, yes. All there rest stands I think.

PostgreSQL was created by Michael Stonebreaker and Larry Rowe, neither of whom are imprisoned. Who are you talking about?

I won’t make secret deals with Citadel. Unlike my broker.

I'm still not sure why all of that is useful. A lot of clever infrastructure, but for exactly what?

Also, it's worth reminding people that ETH might be useful, but still worth less than its current price. There's a ton of speculation propping up the current price.

Right now Ethereum is only useful for niche applications, like using your ETH as collateral for an autonomously issued DAI loan.

This is because its disadvantages, like lack of privacy and very limited throughput capacity, make traditional finance better for all but the highest value blockchain applications, where the extreme integrity of process provided by its highly redundant and collectively managed ledger outweighs its disadvantages, like extremely narrow write bandwidth.

But once those disadvantages disappear, as a result of the aforementioned infrastructure development, I believe that will change, and we'll see Ethereum's advantages make it the preferred platform for mass-consumer applications.

I think you mean "if", not "once".

This is somewhere between self driving cars and flying cars in the feasibility scale.

The solutions to throughput limitations are already proven out in testnets and alpha releases, and well understood conceptually.

Use case: decentralized, censorship-resistant, programmable money. Sorry if it takes more than a decade to disrupt the most entrenched and powerful status quo on earth.

Personally, I never thought it would come this far so quickly, and am quite happy with the pace of adoption and progress.

> decentralized, censorship-resistant, programmable money

accepted by nobody who has something valuable to offer

Still has you talking about it. So, you must in theory accept it if you talk about it. My friend that's logic at play :)

A very important part of any use case is that you clearly define a goal. What is the goal of "decentralized, censorship-resistant, programmable money"? These are crypto invented words that have no meaning outside of the crypto ecosystem.

That's incorrect. Decoupling money from the government is a goal that predates crypto by quite a bit[0][1].

For most people in the first world, cryptocurrency is not an app that will instantly make your life better like Airbnb or Uber. It's a lot more deep and abstract than that. The idea is to separate money from the government. If you don't value financial privacy or don't think the government's ability to arbitrarily inflate the money supply is problematic, it's going to be hard to convince you. How would you respond to someone in China asking: "How does free speech make my life better?" or "How does democracy make my life better?". It's not really a question that can be easily answered with an elevator pitch.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Federal_Reser...

[1] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

An unregulated market where consumers can be exploited.

You're not wrong. The entire cryprocurrency space has been a colossal waste of time and energy.

Plain old databases cut secret deals with Citadel.

It’s just a database. And you just got “justed.”

You don’t want to explain the other use-cases? Would you mind linking to a place that does explain them?

DeFi has concrete use cases. Just look at how derivatives and options work in DeFi. You will see how financial products work in traditional finance. You can understand them by reading their smart contract code. Another example would be reading the code of uniswap [0]. It is a decentralized exchange in other words, it lets you exchange your value without intermediaries and a central authority by having an algorithmic pricing. (Actually, by saying algorithmic, It is actually pretty simple pricing curve :) but it works :).

I hope it is clear.

thank you.

> You will see how financial products work in traditional finance. You can understand them by reading their smart contract code.

But this doesn't need DeFi. You could have open-source trading software without Ethereum.

You could have many things but practically speaking we don't have it :)

Zoom and Netflix are companies that actually produce valueable goods. Both companies have a lot of happy customers. There is a lower bound for the stock price roughly equal to the physical assets of the company. There's no such limit for crypto coins. It can go to 0. There's no reason to assume otherwise.

All of crypto is down that much. Not all of the stock market is. Stop comparing these things.

I pretty much think both are dead, or to be more precise: downscaled.

Netflix has been making bad woke movies for too long. If they had good content at least it would be ok, but they don't.

Most people are back in the office and the competition has caught up, so what is Zoom's justification for existence?

People don't seem to graps the cocept that equity prices are fair market values: the current consensus is that netflix is 80% lower than the high peak. At the height, money was free and i flation low. Now, and in the future, money will be very expensive and inflation high, so why would you hold growth stocks that also don't seem to be producing anything valuable (like netflix bad movie quality).

> will I be unemployable because I spend several years in the scammy crypto industry?

People that worked at Enron, Lehman, LTCM, et al all got new jobs quite easily. You'll be fine.

> the constant backlash from the public is nagging me

The public is mostly angry that they paid too much. They were speculative gamblers that bought into the bubble extremely late. This is no different than people who aggressively took loans to play landlord at the height of the housing bubble. I can empathize with people that buy idiotic scam tokens as well as people that end up holding a ton of debt as their houses get foreclosed but at the end of the day they, not you, are responsible for their poor decision making. Do you really think it is your fault that people out there mortgaged their house to do 100x leveraged longs on dog themed coins?

If the wheel of fortune had gone their way instead of those shorting them, they wouldn't show any sympathy for the shorts.

> People that worked at Enron, Lehman, LTCM, et al all got new jobs quite easily. You'll be fine.

A lot of them probably struggled quite a bit to recover.

Also, you don't know which opportunities you don't have access to anymore. People won't tell you: "I don't want to work with you because you worked for an obnoxious ad tech company", but quite a few people will think this very hard in their head.

Don't underestimate the ethical questions in your career choices.

> A lot of them probably struggled quite a bit to recover.

The ones that were a party to fraud or extreme folly, sure, but competent people generally had the same difficulty finding a new position as anyone else after their company goes under. I knew people at Enron and Lehman that had new jobs within days and weeks of the blowup. It isn't a big deal and no reasonable person is going to hold normal employees responsible for the blowups of executives or tides of the market. Especially when useful developers are in extreme demand.

> but quite a few people will think this very hard in their head.

Not having to work with people who think this about potential colleagues is a blessing in itself.

If you worked for Amazon, Facebook, Google, or a similar social media / adtech company, I think you’d be doing more real damage to society. The only difference is that these organizations have a better PR department.

Crypto has pluses and minuses and you should determine whether it’s a technology you believe in or not. I think basing your opinion of it on “the public” or (notoriously uninformed about crypto) HN opinion is just a bit mentally weak. Either believe in what you’re doing, or do something else. But don’t base your feelings on what the mob thinks.

Don’t worry about future employability, surely some people won’t hire ex-crypto guys. But no more than people won’t hire ex-amazon or ex-whatever.

Just make sure your company isn‘t scammy.

It looks like higher interest rates is going to burst a lot of bubbles. So maybe the industry will go back to its non-speculative roots soon.

That said, the environmental aspect is an issue that will linger.

Here is another angle to look at this ... if you have the stomach or appetite for risk. Stay there and document as much as possible from whatever angle that you can. Immerse yourself in literature about similar failed projects and scams (there are so many now from podcasts to books). Cover the problem domain from as many angles as you can (not just technology but ethics and who gets conned in society, the social dynamics around pump & dump). Write down and corroborate your findings with facts and pay _especially_ attention to time/dates (and who else knew about it).

What you should do will become visible by itself very soon. It'll be crystal clear what is the right thing to do. Contact a journalist? contact the feds? create an anonymous podcast? or talk to somebody who will air your story? write a book? all of the above?

It can be highly stressful and it might take another 2-3 years to gather all the evidence. But the characters in this game are always very shady, and if they haven't already broken some laws or crossed some ethical boundaries they will do so in the future.

> I am also worried about future employability. If crypto fails, which is a real possibility in my mind, will I be unemployable because I spend several years in the scammy crypto industry?

It will make things harder, but the places you really want to work will recognize the truly difficult technical problems you are solving and look past the industry.

I worked with a couple of guys who used to work in porn -- some of the best engineers I ever worked with. It took a while for them to find a place that would move them past the recruiting screens, but once they did they ended up with great jobs that recognized their talent.

As long as you aren't running a scam you have nothing to worry about. Most people don't care about crypto one way or the other, all the noise comes from a small group of boosters and haters.

Live by your own values, I'd say.

Crypto is interesting and is not going away. Find a company that does have proper values. Not all of it is about selling coins.

I run a very small DLT operation where we don't even mention crypto or blockchain. We just talk about empowering local communities and restoring biodiversity. We don't associate with Cryptobro's and there's plenty of companies like us.

I guess we're just a little harder to find because we don't scream so hard :)

Don't give up, apply you talent to create the world you do want to be a part of. <3

If you don't mind, how do you make money? I assume DLT means distributed ledger technology, and the monetizeable problems this solves seem scarce to me (except the grifts bothering OP)

There's lots of ways to make money, actually. You just have to let go of the idea that you need to create value 'on chain' in some kind of fancy economic model, like DeFi, where you are on top of some pyramid.

DLT to us, is about trust. Not about the technical solution. It's an endless discussion between 'it could just as well be a database', yes it could. But to get competing parties to cooperate in a meaningful and productive way, requires either contracts and lawyers or DLT (with still some contract and lawyers, but less so, and only at the start)

The last one is much easier and faster to develop and innovate with.

Making money to us, is about adding value to an ecosystem and extracting a small portion of that to pay the bills.

Right, but that's very abstract. So what value do you manage to add? Should I assume you develop custom/bespoke Software where two slightly distrustful parties have to share write/read access and use DLT to make it easier for parties to agree?

Well yes, but you asked about possible monitization and how they seemed scarse, but there's actually lots of value in creating these kinds of systems. You even came up with one of your own now :)

Share a link to your project?