Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 345 posts

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#31

Post by wild-eep »

I left earlier this year, and worked in the space for a couple of years. I started with a neutral position on crypto, I didn't even think about it much. More like, its easy and pays well. But if people want to waste their money on tokens, go for it, but its not my cup of tea.

Then I started to recognize that its predatory and actually not benign or harmless. It is taking advantage of people. It started to become gross, and nobody I worked with shared any views or skepticism that I had. They all pretty much treated it like a religion across the board. Glad I left. I turned down money that most would not get a chance at in their lifetime, but where that money came from did not sit right with me, nobody in that company deserved any of it. I guess I was not cutthroat enough ... seems like this space is reserved only for snakes, and fools.

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#32

Post by onetom »

Jistern wrote: post #16
seibelj wrote: post #2

I have dedicated the majority of my professional career to crypto. I am deeply passionate about the industry and its potential to disrupt the global financial system, and IMO it has already in significant and profound ways. Whether you agree or not, it has certainly brought the discussion of fiat currencies, central banks, and the philosophy of monetary systems from the backwater of forgotten academics to a real deba…

Quoted post unavailable.

And you sound like a robot, giving the same canned response to others' comments.

I suspect, your definition "crypto" is not the same as the definition of OP.

Can you elaborate more, why do you think it's a fad?

Have you tried to write, deploy or at least use any Ethereum contacts? Do you know how Merkle trees work or at least what are they useful for? How about elliptic curves?

I worked on this off-chain technology a few years ago: https://github.com/enumatech/sprites/tree/master/examples/pa...

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#33

Post by highwaylights »

whiplash451 wrote: post #5

The crypto dent is on your resume now. At this point, you may as well stick around and make a dent in the crypto world. Find a way to have an impact. Write blog posts. Get a serious project delivery under your belt. As to what you (or other people) think about your resume: don't be so hard on yourself. You made this choice for a decent reason. Follow your intuition and try to have fun / have an impact somewhere.

Not sure this is the best advice, although it’s clearly well intentioned.

If op doesn’t believe in what they’re doing, and knows it’s not for them, throwing more of your energy and time into it could just be a waste.

(This is true of any career. More time invested means better prospects means harder to start over because you’d be starting over without experience for likely less pay. Breaking that cycle will get harder the longer you wait.)

To quote a great man:

“No amount of money ever bought a second of time.” - Howard Stark, (creator of Web 4.0 and inventor of Recentralised Finance).

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#34

Post by jedberg »

> I am also worried about future employability. If crypto fails, which is a real possibility in my mind, will I be unemployable because I spend several years in the scammy crypto industry?

It will make things harder, but the places you really want to work will recognize the truly difficult technical problems you are solving and look past the industry.

I worked with a couple of guys who used to work in porn -- some of the best engineers I ever worked with. It took a while for them to find a place that would move them past the recruiting screens, but once they did they ended up with great jobs that recognized their talent.

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#35

Post by seanp2k2 »

titanomachy wrote: post #30
edmundsauto wrote: post #21

Don’t worry about what the public thinks. Does your work align with your values? Do you feel it’s ethical and doesn’t take advantage of people? The public morality once thought it was unethical to help humans escape slavery. It is not a good barometer, especially when the tide against crypto has turned strictly because it stopped making speculators and scammers cash.

In my social circles, there has been intense negative sentiment against crypto consistently since 2016. Is there really a “turning tide”?

Well, given that quite a few people lot quite a lot of value with crypto in the past 6 months, I’d say that’s a turning tide.

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#36

Post by overkalix »

Let me interject with a related issue I've seen in HN and its "Who's hiring" posts. I'm tired of having to waddle through the crypto/blockchain/web3 offers that are seemingly and permanently 6 months away from solving most of humanities issues. Most of them are grifters and they should not be rewarded with visibility in this forum.

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#37

Post by foepys »

seibelj wrote: post #2

I have dedicated the majority of my professional career to crypto. I am deeply passionate about the industry and its potential to disrupt the global financial system, and IMO it has already in significant and profound ways. Whether you agree or not, it has certainly brought the discussion of fiat currencies, central banks, and the philosophy of monetary systems from the backwater of forgotten academics to a real deba…

What we are seeing is the cryptocurrency market reinventing all the mechanisms the "traditional" banking industry has been using for decades. There is no disruption when the whole thing is doing exactly the same just unregulated combined with extremely high risk.

Cryptocurrencies will always have the problem of interacting with the real world, where people are not bound by smart contracts and do not behave "rationally". Not everything is codifyable, especially not people.

> The 2018-2020 bear market was a true test of die hard crypto employees. Bitcoin went to $3k as the tech industry boomed. So many talented people capitulated and went to FAANG pa$ture$ but those of us who stuck it out also got paid.

Only if they sold and this money came from other people who put it into this negative sum game. Remember that the true winners of it all are the electricity providers that are delivering the power to drive mining all those proof of work coins. The losers are the people who put in their money last and are left holding the bags.

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#38

Post by tjpnz »

Not in the same position as you currently, but in a previous life I did work for a company which was pursuing NFTs. That bothered me but it wasn't the entirety of the business as they were also working on projects which I could see having some intrinsic value. That's what crypto businesses will have to demonstrate if they're going to survive the current turmoil and you could view that as an opportunity.

At the very least you're not working for Meta.

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#39

Post by roca »

roenxi wrote: post #18

> However, the constant backlash from the public is nagging me. There isn't a constant backlash from the public - most people don't care, the ones that like it buy and the ones that don't write grumpy blog posts about it. The people who do care have split into the aye and nay camps and are arguing the situation out. The usual anti-capitalist types will hate it, but they hate everything financial. Although any specifi…

Eventually the "industry" will burn through the available pool of gullible "investors" who can be suckered into giving up their money. New suckers are born every minute, of course, but they won't be enough to keep the crypto industry above the background noise of regular frauds and scams.

Re: Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?

#40

Post by vandahm »

I can only speak for myself, but even though I am very skeptical of DeFi and crypto, I don't look down my nose at people simply because they see it differently. I do look down my nose at people who are deliberately running scams, but it doesn't sound like you're doing that.

I think there's a dark side to most things, and that in the beginning it's not easy to see what it is. For example, I think that social media can be destructive to society and to individual people in a variety of ways that weren't at all obvious to me when I was younger. I don't think it was bad to believe in it, though -- it did, in fact, make the internet useful and accessible to way more people, and that's probably a good thing in the long run, even with all the problems that come with that.

In the worst case, you'd have to tell a future employer, "I went to work in DeFi because I believed in the potential of the underlying technology, but [IT DIDN'T WORK OUT || I DON'T BELIEVE IN IT ANYMORE] and now I'm ready to move on." That sounds pretty reasonable to me?

Post reply on HN