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

what would be an example of a real use-case that ETH does well? The core promise of ETH is smart contracts and that code is somehow "law". But that got exposed for the idiotic reasoning that it was and went out of the window when they had to hard-fork in 2017.

No matter what they did since then to improve the old pre-2017 ETH nobody can tell me that bugs don't happen and if they do on this scale then human intervention in inevitable. This is however contra the promise that everything is decentralized by design and not under control of a single actor. Then there are the countless promises about its potential driven up by Gavin Wood & Vitalik Buterin that in hindsight look just like stalling for more time to ensure further funding rounds.

Woods & Buterin are both scammers that extracted millions from their mark. And they were able to do so because they have the technical background to pull it off and are also slightly smarter than the average mobbed-up shit-coin peddler like Dr. Ruja Ignatova or that Australian Satoshi-cosplaying clown Craig Wright.

ETH maybe hasn't been exposed as a scam yet but it is still an example of "fake it till you make it" at all cost and is in the same territorry as "Theranos", "Inventing Anna" - a series of broken promises, stalling techniques for more funding and lost egos of the founders who think of themselves as too big to fail.

A list of areas where Ethereum has made huge progress:

* building secure smart contracts - more sophisticated auditing programmes by more experienced companies, improvements in programming languages, including Solidity, and improvements in formal verification techiques, have reduced the prevalence of major hacks of blue chip smart contracts significantly since 2015

* enabling privacy with public validation. Zk-SNARK and other zkp based mixers have gone from theory to reality with the launches of Tornado Cash, the AZTEC Network, and CAPE.

* Protocol fine-tuning, like the implementation of EIP1559, to improve fee predictability

* The creation of a Proof of Stake consensus protocol that maintains the same decentralization of Proof of Work, while providing a given level of security at a much lower economic cost

* Scalability technologies like Optimistic and ZK-Rollups

* Protocol upgrades like sharding to expand the capabilities of Rollups

These all took time to build, and will take more time still to reach production quality, but are shaping up to provide a vastly more useful blockchain platform than what was launched in 2015.

However, I don't foster any negative feelings towards developers per se. A job's a job, and crypto isn't exactly as easy as your run of the mill CRUD application development.

By working in the ethereum space you've proven you can work with/around obscure tools, learn strange jargon, probably have some knowledge of cryptographic algorithms, and a willingness to do a deep dive in what you believe in. I'm no hiring manager, but to me that all seems like a bunch of skills that will transfer to many businesses outside crypto.

There's more to a person than what areas of business they have experience in. You can work for Big Oil, Facebook/Google/UmbrellaCorp, or Nestlé and be a perfectly good person just doing their job. Anyone refusing you simply because you worked in crypto at some point is short-sighted.

Even if you are a crucial part in the next big rug-pull-sold-as-ending-world-hunger, I honestly doubt you'll run into too many ethical qualms unless you screw up enough to actually break the law and get caught. It's not like Meta or Wells Fargo suddenly care about ethics if you can talk things straight enough, most big companies are morally bankrupt anyway.

Crypto can't fail, the question is just what kind of crypto there will be, will there be a centralized corpo/state dystopia paired with surveillance or can we recreate everything in a robust, decentralized and anonymous way to bring forth an unprecenentend social mobility for all?