Vast majority is indeed a scam.
Perhaps there are some genuine efforts.
Key is to identify what satisfies you as an individual and follow that path.
There are no perfect jobs.
Find your mission and find meaning in striving for that.
Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
51–60 of 198 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#52Frankly, 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?
No, it’s not about that. I put a lot of it down to love of authority. Lots of folks can’t understand why anyone would want some money that didn’t have men with guns to save them. “My bank is safe”. These folks are trusting. Government will save the day.
And some don’t trust anyone. Hate banks. Love technology. See how detaching monetary systems from authority provides freedom.
It’s about trust. I trust none. Bitcoin is perfect, it is the money of my enemies and my friends.
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#53Genuine question, have you worked for any other startup over the last decade? The entire last decade was filled with the same questions, without the adjectives cryptocurrency or blockchain involved. It's all about excess liquidity, and of course it does laser focus on some industries. Good luck calling the top.
Broad-brush crypto whataboutism strikes again.
“Maybe it’s a scam, but so is [central banking / the stock market / every other startup / etc.]”
You’re trying to gaslight the OP to believe that what they’re feeling is normal, but it’s not. In startups with real products and real users and actual growth, the mood is not “we’re just dumping tokens.”
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#54its a popular method to launder money, mostly. i think some alt coins will thrive and maybe find a niche but Bitcoin will continue to dominate. dont even try to compete with Bitcoin you will lose. smart contracts. lightning network. etc. hard to beat. i'd like to see more resources put into progressing useful apps like the tox project. (decentralized messaging service). lets take back our data and privacy. i'm sure we'll see some cool stuff built on top of Bitcoin. and i really like what Gamestop is doing with NFTs and defi. stock trading on the blockchain would be great to combat the illegal naked short selling wall street is doing. it's pretty much financial terrorism what these scum bag hedge funds get away with.
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#55Well, I do get you in the sense that most bitcoiners (assuming btc is the main crypto used in ur company) religiously believe that this is the actual new way of storing monetary value. It may be the case,without the problems of money printing/inflation and so on, but yeah it's still yet to be proved by the entire world as an effective means of doing so. My company is also really into btc, and I've felt like I'm in a…
That sounds like 2014. We have whole countries in 2022.
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#56I worked for one in DeFi on the Cardano ecosystem and I can say it is definitely a scam. But due to some paperwork I signed I can't (for now) tell who or which startup this is. They have been pulling all kinds of dirty marketing tricks while spending no time developing any actual product. I just look at the crowd that support this project and I am so so teribly disappointed and pitiful for them.
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#57Yes it’s a scam but so is most of tech. A lot of billion dollar companies with business models that don’t work. Some scams will be profitable and some may even emerge to be viable product but it’s scammy.
There is a continuous spectrum between being the guy Steve Carrell's character Mark Baum meets with in The Big Short at the restaurant smirking about how he knows he's immoral but earns a bigger paycheque than Baum, and being a hard-working rule-abiding capitalist. Most tech companies are somewhere in the middle. I'm pretty sure if you work somewhere, you can tell where on the spectrum you fit. If you do know, and it's on the bad end, and you keep working there, the fact that there exists a spectrum really has no bearing on the morality of your choices.
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the elephant in the room that everyone is ignoring - the entire financial system is a scam. It's rigged in favor of the ruling class, which is why cryptocurrency originally became popular. The difference is that most cryptocurrency schemes are a different kind of scam - one of trickery rather than abject domination, and something you can avoid if you understand enough about how it works. Something that can't b…
The counter point (whether you believe it or not) is that the existing financial system also has benefits over any other political/economic system of resource distribution. Crypto doesn't have that upside at this time I don't think.
It does. The traditional system reinforces systemic biases. Trustless systems don’t care about system biases. Peer to peer systems route around this.
It was always about empowering the individual.
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#59Much of modern finance was illegal 50 years ago. The first financial future was traded on May 16, 1972. Before that, futures were confined to agricultural commodities, where they were used mostly by farmers and buyers of agricultural products. The first junk bond was sold in 1986, and it achieved the largest percentage gain on the NYSE, then in 1987 suffered the largest percentage loss. Until 1999, banks and brokerage houses were totally separate. Half a century ago, such activities were viewed as gambling. There were still people around who remembered 1929 and the Great Depression.
Finance used to be a support function for industry. Now, in the US, industry is almost a support function for finance - just something to generate numbers to bet on, like horse racing.
Cryptocurrencies are the ultimate extension of this trend. They're totally detached from any physical reality, or even economic reality. NFTs are worse. Most are overpriced pet rocks.
It's worth noting that China does not work this way. China's government has kept finance in its box, focusing investment on actually making real stuff. That seems to be working out. The US has lost the capability of making consumer electronics and telecom gear. US Steel, once the biggest steelmaker, is now in 35th place. This may end with the US a has-been country, like Britain, pining for the glory days of empire.
How does this unwind? Well, the bottom has fallen out of Axie Infinity, once the biggest NFT. It's really hard to tell the value of NFTs on OpenSea, because there's so much wash trading and not much liquidity. But it seems to be difficult for a purchaser to sell an NFT at a profit. Profits mostly flow to minters. As I point out now and then, NFTs as investments work a lot like Beanie Babies on eBay - high asking prices, low actual selling prices, large numbers of items on sale with high reserves and no bids. That's what an illiquid market looks like.
ICOs were a big thing back in 2018. Then the SEC started cracking down. Now there are few ICOs, and the SEC is working through the backlog, bringing the hammer down on about two ICO promoters per month. In the aftermath, not only were most ICOs failures [1], it's hard to find any that created a business outside cryptocurrency speculation. There's much tail-chasing in the cryptocurrency world.
Historically, that doesn't end well.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/tech/most-successful-icos-all-t...
Re: Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it's because HN is actually a technically savvy demographic that sees through the bullshit?
No, it’s not about that. I put a lot of it down to love of authority. Lots of folks can’t understand why anyone would want some money that didn’t have men with guns to save them. “My bank is safe”. These folks are trusting. Government will save the day. And some don’t trust anyone. Hate banks. Love technology. See how detaching monetary systems from authority provides freedom. It’s about trust. I trust none. Bitcoin…
As a counterpoint I'm a libertarian and very anti centralization. I see libertarians arguing for bitcoin alone the same lines as you. A decentralized medium of exchange might be nice, but as it is, cryptocurrency fails to address any of the concerns with fiat, and most importantly is a scam who's value is entirely based on speculation / greater fool, and not on it's utility as a medium of exchange. From what I've seen, it's on that basis that HN generally doesn't like it, not based on some deference to authority, which I agree is present in many discussions