Does HN hate crypto? Does HN love rust and pg essays?
Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
41–50 of 198 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#42Would you let your parents or grandparents invest their life savings in whatever you’re doing? Or in any crypto “asset?” If the answer is no it’s probably a scam. I wouldn’t try to sell junk bonds or penny stocks or Beanie Baby futures to my parents either, but the obvious fact that scams exist independent of crypto doesn’t make crypto any more credible.
Even if I had a 'legit' startup, I would not let my parents or grandparents invest their life savings into it. Startups are not for retail investor's retirement funds.
There's the difference between investing in the startup (taking shares in a specific company) and investing in crypto though, right? I'd happily encourage my parents or grandparents to invest in an 'index fund' of startups in a bunch of different fields. I can't say the same about an index of crypto companies, and especially not in an index of crypto assets.
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#43Frankly, this is the wrong audience. While, I love HN for technical advice and learning about new technologies and startup companies the vast majority of HN comments on finance and investing are flat out cynical, wrong, and the opposite of what I've done. There is a potent anti-capitalist sway to HN that misses the point about how to accumulate wealth. I'll be the first to admit, I lean fiscally conservative, and I g…
Is your contention that criticism of the capitalist system is best explained by sour grapes?
I think someone strongly anti-capitalist would not be incredibly interested in the best strategies to accumulate wealth. And that is not a point against their critique.
Now if they didn't understand the system they were criticizing that is another thing. But in your comment it seems to imply only the rich would have a valid opinion - though I think that class has obvious biases in this discussion.
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#44Frankly, this is the wrong audience. While, I love HN for technical advice and learning about new technologies and startup companies the vast majority of HN comments on finance and investing are flat out cynical, wrong, and the opposite of what I've done. There is a potent anti-capitalist sway to HN that misses the point about how to accumulate wealth. I'll be the first to admit, I lean fiscally conservative, and I g…
Maybe it's because HN is actually a technically savvy demographic that sees through the bullshit?
Tech savvy does not equate to financial savvy. There is way too much cynicism here on HN related to investing, crypto, capital preservation (taxes) and expansion (investing).
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#45No post body was provided.
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#46You’re asking this on HN so are likely to get 95% of people agreeing with you from confirmation bias alone. Median HN hates cryptocurrency. I’d probably suggest this: https://www.matthuang.com/bitcoin_for_the_open_minded_skepti... I think it’s not “all a scam”, but there are definitely scammers in the community which add a lot of noise to what’s a pretty cool new capability to handle decentralized state. https://danr…
You don't list any so I'll bite, I guess. What "cryptocurrency" company isn't a "scam" as basically defined in the post?
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#47I'm working in the same environment, I'm with you bro, it's all a scam. I'm coasting until the whole thing collapse cashing in my paycheck. The math behind is fun though.
I don't get how you can work with something that you perceive as a scam? So when you tell your friends or your parents you say "yeah, I rip people off for a living. Haha"?
I think many classes of people are incapable of being anything other than broke.
Why shouldn't I profit from human nature?
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#48I work in crypto and have done for the last couple years. To be totally transparent, I worked on Cardano, then a couple random projects including a cosmos DEX and writing test suites for a qa consultancy, and now a startup DEX. I've been active in the scene (investing, reading papers, talking about crypto etc) since around 2016 and worked in it since 2019.
I think there's a few things here. I don't believe that many people are actively and knowingly working on deliberate scams, but there definitely are some. I do think a lot of people are working on trash and it's only sustainable as a business model because people are making speculative investments, such as Decentraland clothing brands (wtf?). I'm in the field because I like the technical challenges - I've been really lucky at working on some pretty hard/cool things with some really smart engineers. However I do find the constant onslaught from HN, news articles, random people on the internet and in real life, to be too much for my mental health and I'm considering leaving the industry to work on something else. Even if you're just trying to have fun working with a tech stack you enjoy (I've spent time in Haskell, Rust, Go, etc... most of the hip cool ones), being accused of being a scammer every 5 minutes is just very very draining. I still don't believe I have enabled any scams directly but I don't want to spend the next few years of my career justifying that either. In fact I just was talking to my wife about this before opening HN and seeing this question.
I think I need to take a few months off and start looking for something that's tangible like robotics, or something more visual. I'm just not in the position to do that right now. All the best to you anyway - I hope you can keep it all together better than I can!
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#49Same as another poster. It's so obviously a scam I have nothing to do with it. I'm increasingly amazed how screwed up the world is getting, like how more and more people and businesses jump onto something, obviously out of greed or fomo, that is so objectively a huge scam. There was a post not long ago about our obligation as people who know better to speak out about this stuff. Thankfully I've explained to my parent…
At least drug dealing provides a product: drugs/inebriation/escapism - it's something . After all these years of crypto, I still haven't figured out what the product is. The crypto zealots talk about government-free financial transactions, but none of the crypto commercials/marketing ever mentions that.
Crypto provides a way to launder money, sell drugs, etc., so it is "something" by similar measure.
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#50I've also messed around in the space and have the same doubts. I recently made a small hearthstone-like card game that lets you link NFTs as playable cards for a hackathon but I don't know whether to put it on my github because I don't want people to get the impression that I'm a crypto/nft shill. I'm thinking of stripping all the NFT parts out and putting it up as a generic game because I was quite proud of the implementation in some areas and I ended up putting a significant chunk of time into it.