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The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

mollywhite.net

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Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#51

Post by pavlov »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #27
di4na wrote: 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…

> Stephen Diehl (who's been astroturfing crypto because he works on his own blockchain company)

If you criticise crypto based on general software engineering experience, the cryptobros say: "You don't know what you're talking about!"

If you criticise crypto based on experience trying to actually use it, the cryptobros say: "You're astroturfing!"

Thus the only people allowed to discuss crypto are seemingly those with a financial interest in token prices going up. Funny how that works.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#52

Post by seibelj »

librish wrote: 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.

I find a lot of DeFi projects to be very useful, but you have a logical fallacy -

If I buy 1% of Apple stock at $100, and later it's worth $1000 based on the last trading price, money didn't change hands to make me have more USD, it's my paper wealth.

If Bitcoin goes from $1 to $50k, and I never sell, I didn't take any money - the wealth simply grew.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#53

Post by fizzyfizz »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #27
di4na wrote: 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…

I was surprised by the claim about Stephen Diehl so I did a little googling. I don't think it's correct to say he "works on his own blockchain company". However, relatively recently he was working on smart contracts with a company called Adjoint.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180220171955/https://www.steph...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFlu61wJe2Y

He seems to have been interested in smart contracts but found the current implementations appalling. He wanted to use functional programming, particularly Haskell, to create something like a smart contract with better guarantees. But he is also careful to say that a smart contract doesn't imply a blockchain; he's talking more generally about code that executes over distributed databases.

This stuff is scrubbed from his website, and Adjoint doesn't even appear on his LinkedIn profile. But I can easily see why that might be the case if he's decided the whole field is rubbish and left the industry, or if his work is being misconstrued.

That said, having examined blockchains in depth gives him more credibility, not less. And it would be a rather bizarre business model to continually decry blockchains if he was actually working on one.

---

EDIT: Found an interview where he distinguishes cryptocoins from other technologies sometimes labelled web3, like IPFS. https://www.coywolf.news/podcast/episode-12-stephen-diehl-in...

I think it's fair to say the guy is not an indiscriminate hater. On the other hand, I also personally was already convinced that crypto "currencies" are terrible but IPFS and decentralized organizations might be cool, so I guess I like him more now.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#54

Post by neuroma »

secabeen wrote: post #49
germanjoey wrote: post #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 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.

Agree, but, mind bender... this relationship also applies to currencies. A useful statistic is the volume transactions required to shift the price 2%, looking at an open order book. It gives you a notion of the available liquidity. It is liquidity that matters, as it allows influx and efflux without causing inelastic price movements.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#55

Post by pavlov »

dogman144 wrote: post #41
di4na wrote: 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 a…

There's an important nuance to this: enough unsophisticated people think it's money, so there's lots of opportunity for finance people to make money.

Traditional finance is well-trodden, every arbitrage opportunity has been tried decades ago. But crypto is full of doe-eyed innocents who think they're reinventing finance. Of course experienced traders want to take advantage of them. It must be more fun than ye olde eurodollar bonds, or whatever.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#56

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

dogman144 wrote: post #41
di4na wrote: 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 a…

There's money to be made in trading even when the asset trades at prices that are fundamentally wrong; as long as people are buying and selling, you will find market makers taking the spread. There's also money to be made in asset management for the same basic set of reasons.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#57

Post by danShumway »

carmen_sandiego wrote: post #40
trhaynes wrote: post #10

Does anyone know if there is a tool or platform that makes it easy to make/publish this type of "leave footnotes on an article"? The UX here is nice and simple, and I think there is utility in sharing feedback this way (vs. blockquotes in email, or Google Docs comments, etc).

Maybe https://hypothes.is/ ?

Hypothesis is a really interesting platform, but in my mind it's kind of too community-focused. Hypothesis's restricted groups (https://web.hypothes.is/help/annotating-with-groups/) are closer to what I think people would want, but to get them you'll have to self-host.

Not trying to throw shade at them, but I feel like their push for annotations is hampered a little bit by how much their specific implementation of accounts and permissions feels like yet another social network, with all of the negatives that entails. There are other issues as well, but that's the big one that kept me using the platform.

That being said, there is also an Open standard for this stuff that I remember at the time it came out being pretty excited about. But I haven't seen much if any adoption of it, so it again makes me wonder if there's something wrong with it or if it's just that nobody has made anything super-attractive yet to take advantage of it.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#58

Post by dogman144 »

> Bitcoin, which emerged out of the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis, first caught on among libertarians and anti-establishment activists who saw it as the cornerstone of a new, incorruptible monetary system

> you’ll find a bottomless well of weird, interesting and thought-provoking projects

I hope comment-think pieces like this aren't a norm going forward, as that was pretty brutal to read... "Molly White: so brave." This comes off as Twitter-zens getting together to criticize an insular, tribal world not too different from their own. The worst part of online culture is the snark. For what it is worth, much of the debate on crypto comes from people new to the space, and the long standing critics. For a lot of folks in it for longer, they've given up on the debate as the same arguments get recycled every several years.

That aside, those two quotes "get it," and I was surprised to see them. Crypto has turned into meme culture by and large. But, the tech and design considerations behind btc comes out of one of the most impactful techno-ideological groups out there - the cypherpunks, with a strong helping of post-2008 anger included. btc and notable other parts of crypto, and supporting technology codifies that group's view of the world: permissionless, trustless, private digital action. This is the area to understand when studying crypto.

They viewed it as critical to build three capabilities in digital interactions: private browsing, private comms, private spending. Well, they slowly built all three - Tor, PGP/consumer encryption, and then BTC. Tor and consumer access to encryption has had a tremendous effect, even beyond intense privacy circles. BTC is newer, but what are the odds it won't do the same? Judging by history and cypherpunk movement, it seems silly to ignore it. '08 wasn't too long ago, and not much has changed in the practices that caused the crash. BTC still remains a/the only warts-and-all viable way out of that system.

For what it's worth, here is how I place a value crypto[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30439891#30441946

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#59

Post by forbiddenvoid »

dvt wrote: post #31
frankbreetz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are thr salaries much higher? You group yourself with TikTok and think the engineers are leaving for something other then money?

Token offers (which a lot of crypto companies give), often have more upside than RSUs (especially if you're bullish on crypto as a whole), and definitely have more upside than early "traditional" startup equity (which is basically worthless).

In both crypto tokens and startup equity, you are literally gambling that there will be a liquid market for your asset.

Tokens _are_ worthless if no one wants to buy them, and pretending that is somehow different than startup equity is ignorant at best and downright predatory in the worst cases.

Crypto growth overall does not mean _your_ token is going to gain value anymore than the general growth of the economy means that startup equity is going to grow in value.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#60

Post by k__ »

"And in Silicon Valley, engineers and executives are bolting from cushy jobs in droves to join the crypto gold rush."

Can't blame them.

Crypto companies are overfunded right now and don't have that traditional big corp gatekeeping going on.

Also, many younger people never had that sweet dotcom experience.

So, why not grab a swash of nice investor money in a still crazy industry?

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