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Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

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Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#51

Post by aaron-lebo »

nemild wrote: post #24

The danger in a space like this is throwing the baby out with the bath water. - Yes, there are an insane amount of scams, and lots of dumb money flowing in - Yes, many use cases of blockchains should really be databases - Yes, many blockchain job posts are just PR initiatives for companies who want to differentiate themselves That said, it's an early time to have a tremendous amount of impact. Don't like "proof of wo…

There's a surprising amount of information out there in regards to how blockchains work and how to build them, especially compared to 2013-2014 ish. They are not dark arts, there's lots of low-hanging fruit which doesn't require working for a company that you disagree with in principle (and to be fair, there's not many blockchain companies that seem to have many principles other than cha-ching).

Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#52

Post by danpalmer »

pascalxus wrote: post #47

He turned down a much higher salary AND "REMOTE WORK!" just because he didn't want to be "associated" with the current state of bitcoin. Remote work possibilities are extremely rare, especially high paying ones. My advice would be, take the job and enjoy it while it lasts. He didn't say much about the company. But, just watch out for scams. If it's not a real company, they might just be trying to get your bank accoun…

The author may not have valued working remotely as highly as you do. Personally I would much rather work in a company office, and selfishly would prefer to not pay the personal cost of working with remote colleagues.

Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#53

Post by andrewstuart2 »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #29

While turning down the job is just fine, here's what happened instead: - Someone else with similar capabilities as OP's probably took the job. - This person will make significantly more money than what OP will be making (as OP points out) - This person will have learned way more about the implication of the technology, whether it actually is as bad as what mainstream media says or if those are all coming from ignoran…

> If you really want to talk shit about Bitcoin

I don't. And I don't think many people do (perhaps those buying put options might). That said, it's not hard to see the cost in power usage, and thus waste heat, that is/will be spent computing hashes that match ever-growing computational requirements.

You're right that I could spend a month of my time learning more about this tech that does obviously have solid implications in the form of distributed untrusted consensus.

That said, it took me maybe 30 minutes researching to understand the huge global power requirements, and in years of observing the tech, nobody has been able to quickly and easily dispel this concern. If it takes a month of in-depth research to make people feel better about bitcoin and dispel years of observing the currency and its ever-growing requirements, then maybe something is wrong. It could be that after a month of very hard work, you have an unconscious cognitive bias because nobody likes to waste a month of work learning something they decide to throw away.

I'd be glad to find an article that, in less than 30 minutes, can change my mind about the waste that bitcoin generates. It's happened plenty of times with other tech (not necessarily waste, but other misjudgments), and often in closer to 5-10 minutes. I don't expect Bitcoin would be any different, because I have no horse in this game. In fact, I'd be really excited to be proven wrong, because of the potential benefits that the tech has to offer.

Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#54

Post by tonyjstark »

marcelogranja wrote: post #3

I disagree, although the ecosystem is filled with scams, and evangelists have financial interests in promoting their believes, there are some promising advantages. Also the energy requirements for PoW systems are cheap compared to its gains as pointed out by Nick Szabo: "We need more socially scalable ways to securely count nodes, or to put it another way to with as much robustness against corruption as possible, ass…

If electricity and environment-pollution would not cost anything this would be maybe true and since mining is done mostly in large pools and the blockchain is already quite big (regarding having the whole bc on disk) the social scalability is not really there. And the computing power you need does not really sink because of the adaption of the network so that the hash-rate is kinda stable, so it does not get cheaper.

What makes me really wonder is this talk of corruption robustness when the blockchain world is basically a wild west without laws and regulation where the only reason to behave is financial incentives which obviously brings in more scams than anything else. This would maybe work if it would not be even better to slightly misbehave, you don't need to make a 51% attack, controlling 25% of the mining power already gives you an edge to steer the whole network. [0]

You don't trust Paypal and Visa where laws apply but you trust enormous Mining-Pools in China that were already caught forming carthels?

[0](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/selfish-mining-a-25-att...)

Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#55

Post by fastball »

jraines wrote: post #12
tlb wrote: post #8

In the US, the financial system is about 10% of GDP. (The number depends on your definitions of financial system, US, GDP, and "is"). It also consumes vast amounts of resources ranging from gasoline to drive mortgage brokers to and from work, to the cost of mailing out free low-introductory rate credit cards. It's a fair criticism of Bitcoin that it uses a lot of energy, but it's hard to predict whether it will ultim…

mortgage & credit generally are bad comparisons, because cryptocurrency doesn't solve this. You still need a credit score or similar reputation metric associated with your real legal name/entity. In general I agree, though. Turning energy into trust is definitely worth it, and we're in a price discovery phase to find out what "it" is.

Bitcoin doesn't solve this, but there are plenty[1][2][3][4] of cryptos that realize this failing in Bitcoin and others and are trying to address it.

1. https://www.civic.com/

2. https://stratisplatform.com/identity/

3. https://whycardano.com/#social-elements-of-money

4. https://neo.org/

Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#56

Post by jerf »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #29

While turning down the job is just fine, here's what happened instead: - Someone else with similar capabilities as OP's probably took the job. - This person will make significantly more money than what OP will be making (as OP points out) - This person will have learned way more about the implication of the technology, whether it actually is as bad as what mainstream media says or if those are all coming from ignoran…

I'd add a fourth bullet point, "This person probably won't have a job in 3-6 months".

If you consider that and budget in the costs of looking for a new job, and account for the frankly non-trivial chance that the salary will end up being a lie, given the skeeviness of this space (I'd bet the first paycheck shows up, but my confidence in that goes down rapidly as the weeks wear on), it may not look like such a great offer.

Obviously, there are things that can be taken into account when you know more specifics (i.e., "it's VC backed by a reputable firm" would score some points on the "they at least have some money" front), but absent those I wouldn't start from a high degree of confidence.

Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#57

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

RutZap wrote: post #49
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #29

While turning down the job is just fine, here's what happened instead: - Someone else with similar capabilities as OP's probably took the job. - This person will make significantly more money than what OP will be making (as OP points out) - This person will have learned way more about the implication of the technology, whether it actually is as bad as what mainstream media says or if those are all coming from ignoran…

> lets you explore a new edge technology A little bit off-topic, I find very interesting how blockchain is regarded as a new technology. All the underlying technology has been available for ages: cryptographic hashes, Merkle trees (patented in 1979!!), peer to peer protocols. It's crazy how putting together some already established technologies/techniques/mathematical instruments can generate such a big movement. A l…

It's a new technology because it enables a new human behavior.

With your logic, everything is an old technology.

Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#58

Post by admax88q »

jimmaswell wrote: post #25
ttul wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but... the crypto algorithm chosen for Bitcoin is about as energy intensive as they come. Other algorithms which are more equipment intensive - scrypt etc - provide the same benefits but without the same disgusting externality of power consumption. I wish I grasped proof of stake better. I’m not yet convinced it can be made to work as well as PoW.

Maybe the more energy we consume, the more motivated we'll be to move to more efficient methods. And the available fossil fuels are projected to run out at some point, aren't they? So if we're going to use them all anyway before switching fully to 100% renewable/alternative sources, then using it up faster doesn't result in more total emissions, just more now and less later. After that, we'll be "wasting" hydro and n…

If I take all the pollution or greenhouses gases that we would dump in a 100 year period and dump them all today, it's possible that the impact from that would be unrecoverable.

Total emissions isn't the only important measurement.

Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#59

Post by Sangermaine »

alex_duf wrote: post #26
fwdpropaganda wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you, but I have to point out that ML at least have already shown that can solve problems that need to be solved which had no solution before.

So did the blockchain Edit: not trying to defend bitcoin here, just pointing that the blockchain brought a new solution to a trust issue

No, it didn't. Blockchain technology is perhaps the biggest recent example of a solution in search of a problem. It's interesting but still not clear at all what it would be useful for over what already exists:

>"Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain"

https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...

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