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Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

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Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#181

Post by mmcnl »

latchkey wrote: post #81
granddemolisher wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 a…

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

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#182

Post by granddemolisher »

xEnOnn wrote: post #8

I’m curious that do individual devs of these crypto protocols really earn a lot like what many would have thought about them? By a lot, I mean like at least a million dollars a year that range of income. I mean, as we all know, in many of these protocols, not saying that your protocol is one of those though, the devs have almost full control over the protocol’s operations. It’s not really that “decentralised” as many…

Some of the popular protocols pay around 50-200K USD per month to developers or they used to at least before the bear market.

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#183

Post by mmcnl »

notahacker wrote: post #148
latchkey wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 count…

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.

100% true. Awful elitism.

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#184

Post by mmcnl »

granddemolisher wrote: post #89
latchkey wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 count…

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

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?

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#185

Post by 411111111111111 »

edanm wrote: post #178
tgv wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#186

Post by Kiro »

nikanj wrote: post #180
Kiro wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#187

Post by charcircuit »

tgv wrote: post #170
charcircuit wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

>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.

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#188

Post by rockatanescu »

yoaviram wrote: post #47

Maybe this will help change your mind or at least give you a better alternative within the field: http://nonstructured.com/in-defense-of-web3/ But if it doesn't change your mind and you don't believe in this industry you should find another job, somewhere which aligns with your values. I don't believe nutral is good enough.

> The combined brainpower working on Web3 is unprecedented.

The data that I have seen indicates that there are roughly 20.000 developers [1] actively working in the web3 space. Only Microsoft has roughly 100.000 software engineers.

[1]: https://cointelegraph.com/news/web3-developer-growth-hits-an...

> That rate of innovation pales in comparison to what’s happening around Web3; it’s nowhere near it. There are about 18.5K cryptocurrencies in existence (12K with a whitepaper), out of which about 10K are active in 2022, and the rate is increasing exponentially (about 50% of all cryptocurrencies on Coinmarketcap were listed in the last year).

So the allegedly unprecendented combined brainpower working on Web3 was able to come up with 18.000 different ways to market a distributed database, out of which only 12.000 could be bothered to even write a document describing how their database works and only 10.000 are still active, even with huge financial incentives.

That's a lot of innovation.

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#189

Post by mudrockbestgirl »

mmcnl wrote: post #173
mudrockbestgirl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 w…

> 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.

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#190

Post by palmetieri2000 »

itsoktocry wrote: post #156
jeroenhd wrote: post #97

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 de…

> 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.

Is a bartender morally obligated to leave because they acknowledge the harm alcohol causes to society?

Is the crypto dev more or less obligated than the bartender?

Really I agree with you, but also feel like this is a thread that people aren't that keen on unravelling or talking about because it leads them to realize that their job probably isn't as 'un-shady' as at first glance.

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