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Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

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Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#151
Like this author and many here I've been dismissive of the blockchain ecosystem as it stands. Especially Bitcoin, for while I appreciate the potential of Ethereum as a platform in itself, Bitcoin seems much less flexible.

However my thinking has begun to change since reading over the technical specs of the Bitcoin Lightning Network.

The basic idea is that open payment channels of liquidity will be part of a payments routing scheme, directed from me to whatever address I want to deposit funds into. You can read about it here [1].

This system is still being developed but if it works it could reinvigorate Bitcoin.

[1]: https://lightning.network

Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#152
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…

>Get angry at banks? I've found in many fields that are as complex as finance, that when I think something in that field is stupid, unnecessary, or onerous, it is I that am wrong because I simply didn't understand the why of how that thing came about. So I find it fascinating how many people/groups in history have gotten mad at banks/finance, tried to make a "better" product, gotten stung or robbed others, only to ev…

This is true of a lot of Silicon Valley startups I've seen lately as well. They make a big show of how they can do things better, faster, more efficiently, and cheaper than existing incumbents, until the government comes in and says "Did you buy your insurance? Are you paying your employees (or treating them as employees in the first place)? Are you providing benefits? Are you certified?"

Then suddenly, the SV companies say "hey, this is BS, we can't be competitive like this! If we have to do all these things then we can't be cheaper than the incumbents!"

Joel Spolsky said it pretty well[0]:

There’s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: it’s harder to read code than to write it.

Now we've gotten to the point where people are taking entire buildings and making them short-term rentals (they're called Hotels), ride-sharing services are talking about multi-person trips to and from designated locations (it's called a bus or shuttle), and so on.

Everyone wants to be Stripe or Square and reinvent and simplify things that people hate, but no one stops to think if this is an area that's complicated on purpose or if people just think they're smarter than everyone else who came before them.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#153

I don't necessarily disagree with the author here, but I would be genuinely curious if the job offer was for one of the "scammy cryptocurrency ICOs" or for one of the industry use case that seem to be destined to survive after the current round of scamminess passes.

His reasons seemed really strange to me. If I was considering such an offer, my decision would be based in large part on what exactly the company was doing in the space and whether I felt it was good or bad.

It's like turning down a job with government just because governments sometimes do bad things.

Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#154
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. Lack of centralized trust is just one feature. They have other features like public (but anonymous) ledgers, irreversible transactions, smart contracts, the ability to hold them without a bank account. Features like those could definitely come from a private or central bank.

If they were centralized they would most definitely have reversible transactions, and probably NOT be anonymous.

A non-crypto solution wouldn't have to have all of these features. These are just some of the possible desirable ones.

Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#155

> Everyone who is talking positively about cryptocurrencies and making hyperbolic claims seems to have invested in them. I thought this was an interesting claim to use as a disqualifier. If you see the promise of blockchain, why wouldn't you invest in them?

It’s not an inherent negative but it’s a huge conflict of interest which every listener needs to factor in, especially since a booster has no long term commitment to stay past the point you buy in.

That doesn’t need to be a conscious attempt to defraud, either: humans are notoriously bad at seeing things accurately when not doing so is highly profitable. A lot of people really believed their house doubled in value over a couple years in the 2000s, or that selling things online was a high margin business before that.

Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#156
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was once hit with a $35 overdraft fee three days in a row for buying a cup of coffee at Starbucks. I was really pissed off... at myself, for not staying on top of my bank balance. I don't consider the bank evil for enforcing terms I agreed to.

It's also often possible to set up low balance alerts including text and email. It's one of the first things I look for when setting up a new bank account (at any bank) - right after turning on 2FA of course.

I got a overdraft about 6 years ago and when I went into the bank to sort it out they said if I want they can just turn off overdrafts so the card will be simply declined. I use a credit union.

Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#157
I liked his comment about trust, it's something that always bothered me with the very radical trust model of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It is not entirely clear why you have to go all the way and do away with _all_ trust, except for niche applications such as transactions for people in repressive regimes (which are necessary but do not require us to replace conventional currencies with cryptocoins). In normally stable countries and economies, trust works great and makes everything so much more efficient.

If you don't like single central banks or intransparent financial institutions - cool, good thing there are Byzantine consensus algorithms that don't require proof-of-work but simply some known identities (in blockchain lingo this would probably be permissioned blockchains). You can get much of the benefits and build an ecosystem around known, trustworthy actors and don't have to use awkward mechanisms like proof-of-work.

Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#158

> Everyone who is talking positively about cryptocurrencies and making hyperbolic claims seems to have invested in them. I thought this was an interesting claim to use as a disqualifier. If you see the promise of blockchain, why wouldn't you invest in them?

Because investing in coins is non-productive, those coins don't generate anything besides demand. If one believes in the technology, one should be investing in companies working on expanding blockchain tech. Also blockchain != coins.

many of the teams working on expanding blockchain tech in the most interesting ways are only investable via coins/tokens. in this way, your statement contradicts itself.

Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being decentralized doesn't mean that Bitcoin can't evolve, though. The process is just - Someone proposes a change to the rules, effective as of some future block number - Each miner decides whether to adopt the proposed rules - The network is forked at that block number; some miners work on the original chain with the old rules while others work on a fork with the new rules - The network converges as most miners, e…

And all of those points is why it is a poor currency. Great we can fork at any time and from any single transaction. So, we can essentially make infinite currencies. That's hugely wasteful and causes mass inflation. It makes it hard to invest, or even take seriously, a currency that may become worthless tomorrow. If you add some centralized backing, like with USD for example, you get way more clout. What would bitcoi…

> Great we can fork at any time and from any single transaction. So, we can essentially make infinite currencies. That's hugely wasteful and causes mass inflation. … If you add some centralized backing, like with USD for example, you get way more clout.

Okay. One of the appeals of cryptocurrencies to anti-government types is that there is predictability and transparency over new currency creation, since it's hard-coded in an algorithm. We can find out exactly how many Bitcoins there will be in five years. Granted, forks can change those algorithms, but they're still transparent. Also, forks of the Etherium Classic or Bitcoin Cash type don't really count as inflation, since you cannot send ETC when the receiver is expecting ETH, and likewise with BCH/BTC; they are not interoperable. In other words, the Bitcoin Cash fork did not cause inflation of core Bitcoin.

Now let's consider USD. Do you know how many USD there will be in five years? USD creation is at the whim of legislators and unelected bureaucrats who could collude tomorrow to crash the value of USD by just letting the printing presses run and there's not really anything that most of the users of USD, the normal people, can do about that. Now I'm not saying that such intentional currency crashing is likely to happen, but that lack of control and predictability is why libertarian types would find the idea of backing cryptocurrency with government fiat currency to be nonsense.

Re: Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer

#160
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…

I will repost a comment of mine from another Bitcoin thread about a month ago regarding this comparison because the comparison is just ridiculous:

Bitcoin is estimated to use about the same energy as the whole country of Denmark[1]. Denmark has over 790 million cashless transactions with "Dankort", a local debit card, per year alone[2] - excluding other payment methods. Bitcoin can handle about 2,000 transactions per block[3]. 2,000 transactions times 6 blocks per hour times 24 hours in a day times 365 days in a year equals 105,120,000 transactions per year.

Congratulations, you just used the energy of the whole country of Denmark with _everything_ in it (housholds, heavy industry, etc.) to process less than a 1/7th of Denmark's cash-less transactions with a _specific_ (albeit widely used) debit card.

You see, your argument is simply invalid. "Traditional" banking is more energy efficient by multiple orders of magnitude.

1: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-...

2: https://www.nationalbanken.dk/en/publications/Documents/2011... (page 125)

3: https://blockchain.info/en/charts/n-transactions-per-block

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