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The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

mollywhite.net

41–50 of 331 posts

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#41
post #3

Worth adding >>> And in Silicon Valley, engineers and executives are bolting from cushy jobs in droves to join the crypto gold rush. No they do not. I am an engineer in a technology heavily used by crypto projects and they have a really hard time recruiting. Engineers slam the door in their face the moment you tell them the opening is for this industry.

What is seen most often is NYC or equivalent finance traders and executives bolting into crypto.

It seems hard for firms below the Coinbase/Kraken/heavy hitter trading shop bar to pull serious resume hires out of SV, but quite a few Managing Director+ level hires moved over into crypto.

My sense is the NYC finance realize a core aspect of crypto - you might not think it's money, but enough people do, and there's an active market for it, so there is quite a bit of money to be made.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#42

Quoted post unavailable.

> Does it not make sense that a reporter on web3/crypto should be entitled to practice owning an ENS domain, in order to better write about the experience from a first hand perspective? It would be like banning a reporter from purchasing their own personal domain name, out of fear it may skew their bias on how they write about HTTP and web protocols.

It absolutely does not. This is what a research budget is for from an organization--and you can shred it/render it nonfunctional afterwards to avoid a personally biasing stake.

As for "personal identities": I know of about half of the folks cited in those articles and all of them, even crypto's scariest nemesis (one David Gerard), have plenty of other things that they do and that they are interested in. Perhaps what you read as a "personal vendetta" is a deep understanding of what a rotgut industry they criticize, and that morality is not fully dead.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#43
post #38
post #36

Until someone has built a crypto product that creates values (for the purpose of this discussion it can be a good or a service would be willing to spend USD on even if it wasn't a crypto) crypto is a negative-sum game. Any USD taken out of the system someone else has to have put in, plus whatever the miners take out. Fortunes aren't created, they are redistributed.

How is it negative sum, and not just zero sum?

There are middlemen extracting fees at every step

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#44
The article (or, rather, the commentary in the link above on the article) talks about the fallacious notion of "market cap" in regards to cryptocurrencies. That is to say, e.g., multiplying the number of bitcoins in existence times the current market price is a silly metric because the entire market would never be able to cash-out at that maximum price.

What I was wondering was: is there a better number? e.g., is there a way to calculate the amount of USD put into a cryptocurrency across a timeframe? What I'm imagining is a metric like (sum of all bitcoins bought by USD purchase price) - (sum of all bitcoins sold by USD sale price) = amount of USD that has been put "into" bitcoin. That first glance, one might expect this number to equal zero, but it should be greater than zero because of the new coins created by mining.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is a company with shady ethic that attracted people willing to look the other way because the money is too good. But they just lost 37% on the "too good" money. So where do you think these people are going next?

Yes and? The original statement was that crypto is having a hard time hiring, the GP rebutted that saying they're seeing FAANG engineers leave. You then try to make an ethical argument. So? What does that have to do with the reality that FAANG, who employes lots of engineers, is losing engineers to crypto? Or do we need to move the goalposts and scope this discussion to "ethically-approved" (TM) companies?

You work for FB or something?

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#46
post #3

Worth adding >>> And in Silicon Valley, engineers and executives are bolting from cushy jobs in droves to join the crypto gold rush. No they do not. I am an engineer in a technology heavily used by crypto projects and they have a really hard time recruiting. Engineers slam the door in their face the moment you tell them the opening is for this industry.

I'm not directly connected to Chainlink's recruiting, but as far as I can tell as an employee, many engineers are enthusiastic about working here.

https://careers.chain.link/

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#47

The article (or, rather, the commentary in the link above on the article) talks about the fallacious notion of "market cap" in regards to cryptocurrencies. That is to say, e.g., multiplying the number of bitcoins in existence times the current market price is a silly metric because the entire market would never be able to cash-out at that maximum price. What I was wondering was: is there a better number? e.g., is the…

The market cap metric may seem silly to you, but it's the same metric used by publicly traded corporations. And there is nothing silly about it. All shareholders would never be able to cash out at the current share price, but this isn't a reason to disregard the market cap metric.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#48
post #3

Worth adding >>> And in Silicon Valley, engineers and executives are bolting from cushy jobs in droves to join the crypto gold rush. No they do not. I am an engineer in a technology heavily used by crypto projects and they have a really hard time recruiting. Engineers slam the door in their face the moment you tell them the opening is for this industry.

This hasn't been my experience at all. I feel like this is just pandering to group sentiment. My work (household name so we work with a lot of companies) has been seeing increased spend from crypto companies and so we've talked with a few folks from these companies and they've been hiring headcount like crazy. We've had lots of our own engineers churn to crypto companies also. Yeah they won't get the anti-crypto-bubb…

[deleted]

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#49

The article (or, rather, the commentary in the link above on the article) talks about the fallacious notion of "market cap" in regards to cryptocurrencies. That is to say, e.g., multiplying the number of bitcoins in existence times the current market price is a silly metric because the entire market would never be able to cash-out at that maximum price. What I was wondering was: is there a better number? e.g., is the…

I would extend this concept to all non-cash financial assets. All of what you wrote above applies to Tesla shares, or Ukrainian real estate, or anything that's not currency. It would still be incredibly useful, but it's also based so much on psychology, I don't know if there's a mathematical way to calculate it, like there was Black-Sholes for futures.

A concrete calculation for this would revolutionize finance.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#50
post #36

Until someone has built a crypto product that creates values (for the purpose of this discussion it can be a good or a service would be willing to spend USD on even if it wasn't a crypto) crypto is a negative-sum game. Any USD taken out of the system someone else has to have put in, plus whatever the miners take out. Fortunes aren't created, they are redistributed.

That's like saying the USD is a negative sum game because "any CNY taken out of the system someone else has to have put in, plus whatever the government takes out. Fortunes aren't created, they are redistributed."

The transference, redistribution, and storage of wealth is itself the value of monetary networks. The more circular trade that doesn't need to exit the network happens, the more valuable the network becomes.

The ultimate point of projects like bitcoin isn't to build a system that makes everyone rich. That would obviously an absurd ponzi like scheme. The point is to build an open monetary system for the whole planet that emerges out of distributed consensus rather than dictated to us by a global superpower, and is therefore not fragile and subject to failure when the superpower declines. Early investors of the network will get rich if it succeeds, just like early investors of any tech giant did. That mechanism of rewarding those who take a risk with their money when the future is uncertain is a huge part of what's driving its continued growth and success. If you didn't have that to bootstrap the network, bitcoin would likely be a forgotten oddity of a cypherpunk project that nobody ever cared about. But now, it's a global money that nation states are adopting.

I do agree that most crypto projects will fail and end up looking like nothing more than pump and dumps to scalp investor money, whether from dumb VCs or retail.

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