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

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

#141

Post by kortilla »

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…

> 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 debate in the public sphere

No it didn’t. This topic comes up all of the time in different contexts. Interest rate decisions, dropping the gold standard, switching to the Euro, running a constant deficit, etc all bring up these exact same topics.

It may seem like crypto brought those topics up, but that’s just because you haven’t been around long enough to remember the 2008 financial crisis and the discussion of the bailouts, or more recently the discussions around the debt crisis in Europe with Greece, etc.

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

#142

Post by andruby »

m00dy wrote: post #137
Thlom wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ETH has been a legitimate technology with real use cases for a decade now and all we’ve got is jpeg’s of apes. With the amount of real money, talent and hard work being pumped into this space we should have seen the use cases materialize by now. But there’s nothing. I’m sure someone uses it for something real, but I haven’t seen crypto actually solve a real problem any better than a plain old database. Please correct…

you are completely wrong. I don't want to explain other use cases here but even though for jpeg's of apes, Ethereum or blockchain industry created a more inclusive economy. (now all the artists, they know at least one more way to monetize their art.)

You don’t want to explain the other use-cases? Would you mind linking to a place that does explain them?

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

#143

Post by tablatom »

neals wrote: post #139

Live by your own values, I'd say. Crypto is interesting and is not going away. Find a company that does have proper values. Not all of it is about selling coins. I run a very small DLT operation where we don't even mention crypto or blockchain. We just talk about empowering local communities and restoring biodiversity. We don't associate with Cryptobro's and there's plenty of companies like us. I guess we're just a l…

Share a link to your project?

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

#144

Post by igorkraw »

neals wrote: post #139

Live by your own values, I'd say. Crypto is interesting and is not going away. Find a company that does have proper values. Not all of it is about selling coins. I run a very small DLT operation where we don't even mention crypto or blockchain. We just talk about empowering local communities and restoring biodiversity. We don't associate with Cryptobro's and there's plenty of companies like us. I guess we're just a l…

If you don't mind, how do you make money? I assume DLT means distributed ledger technology, and the monetizeable problems this solves seem scarce to me (except the grifts bothering OP)

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

#145

Post by eulenteufel »

mudrockbestgirl wrote: post #88
Thlom wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ETH has been a legitimate technology with real use cases for a decade now and all we’ve got is jpeg’s of apes. With the amount of real money, talent and hard work being pumped into this space we should have seen the use cases materialize by now. But there’s nothing. I’m sure someone uses it for something real, but I haven’t seen crypto actually solve a real problem any better than a plain old database. Please correct…

It's an alternative financial system with many of the same (and some different) primitives than the existing ones: Liquidity via AMMs (instead of human or HFT MMs), derivatives, loans, yields, fixed-rate instruments, etc. These are used in the same way the equivalents in TradFi are used, just implemented differently, permissionless and with an API. I believe that many people don't understand the traditional financial…

>They understand how the above instruments are crucial for an economy even though they are not end-user products like Twitter is.

Do they actually know these instruments are crucial for the economy or do they just know how to make money with it? I'd think the latter would be enough.

Can you recommmend any resources to understand the importance of financial instruments to the economy?

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

#146

Post by LeonM »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #116
latchkey wrote: post #63

I've been in crypto since 2014. I just had the California Franchise Tax Board literally steal money out of a bank account of mine without any warning or notice. They left $0.01 in there and charged a $125 fee. I found out today they are claiming I owe taxes from when I wasn't even living in the country (and I was paying taxes then too!). In 2021/2022, I paid more taxes than I ever have in my life. I even over paid ju…

Had similar experience when I was out working in Berlin. I had a gym membership in one part of the city (paid up 12 months in advance in cash). Moved to a different part of the city and didn't go back. Fast forward about six months, two bald headed goons came knocking at my old address looking for me, with a 1850 euro bill. Gym membership for the next year plus a 900 euro service charge because I hadn't written a let…

If it makes you feel better: most gyms are a scam. The whole business model is about selling as much memberships as possible, and making it hard to cancel. Most gyms sell much more memberships than they could even remotely facilitate, because they know ~80% of the members never return after the first month or so.

I used to work at a small gym that could handle maybe 100 visitors a day, I think they had over 8000 paying members. You could only cancel by letter 1 month in advance of the renewal date. The only exception was a doctor's letter for some medical reason you could no longer go to the gym. The owner drove a Ferrari (albeit second hand).

Every year on January, after people had been over-consuming food and had ambitious new year resolutions, they'd do all sorts of promotions, and they would sell for about a years worth of new subscriptions in a day. I'd estimate 90% of those 'januaries' (as they'd call them) no longer returned after the first month. About 75% forgot to cancel in December, so they would be charged again for a full year, though they hadn't visited in 11 months.

This is a common 'exploit' of human behaviour. People feel good about taking the first step in weight loss by buying the membership. But when you think about it, it makes no sense at all why you'd need a 'membership' the gain access to a gym.

This is also why home training devices are a big business, and why they usually come with terrible return policies.

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

#147

Post by tigershark »

granddemolisher wrote: post #92
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ETH is still a legitimate technology with real use cases. 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…

> This is however contra the promise that everything is decentralized by design and not under control of a single actor This is still decentralized because people need to coordinate to make a change. Decentralisation doesn't mean a system without human deciding what happens. It just means decentralisation of the power between the participants and ability to enter the room without creditionalism.

But it demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that code is not law since they breached that law with the hard fork.

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

#148

Post by notahacker »

latchkey wrote: post #84
olalonde wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of stories like this. There are also a lot of unbanked people (1.7 billion worldwide). People who fail to see the value in Bitcoin/crypto often are not aware of those very real problems people are facing. Traditional banking is great so long as you are on the happy path.

In northern Vietnam, where I've done extensive travel, to this day, women store their meager wealth in gold fillings because that is the only place where they can put it and not have it stolen from them. There is no bank where they can deposit funds and even if there was, the Vietnam govt's version of FDIC is like $2k. Amazingly, they also have smart phones and the government has put 4G towers through the whole count…

North Vietnam is also where people earn the equivalent of $30 a month and can't afford to HODL until the next price spike, as well as not having many crypto on/off ramps for the unbanked.

Frankly, the enthusiasm some wealthy Westerners have for dumping newly printed gambling tokens on some of the world's poorest people is part of the cause of the anti-crypto backlash the OP describes.

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

#149

Post by neals »

igorkraw wrote: post #144
neals wrote: post #139

Live by your own values, I'd say. Crypto is interesting and is not going away. Find a company that does have proper values. Not all of it is about selling coins. I run a very small DLT operation where we don't even mention crypto or blockchain. We just talk about empowering local communities and restoring biodiversity. We don't associate with Cryptobro's and there's plenty of companies like us. I guess we're just a l…

If you don't mind, how do you make money? I assume DLT means distributed ledger technology, and the monetizeable problems this solves seem scarce to me (except the grifts bothering OP)

There's lots of ways to make money, actually. You just have to let go of the idea that you need to create value 'on chain' in some kind of fancy economic model, like DeFi, where you are on top of some pyramid.

DLT to us, is about trust. Not about the technical solution. It's an endless discussion between 'it could just as well be a database', yes it could. But to get competing parties to cooperate in a meaningful and productive way, requires either contracts and lawyers or DLT (with still some contract and lawyers, but less so, and only at the start)

The last one is much easier and faster to develop and innovate with.

Making money to us, is about adding value to an ecosystem and extracting a small portion of that to pay the bills.

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

#150

Post by neals »

tablatom wrote: post #143
neals wrote: post #139

Live by your own values, I'd say. Crypto is interesting and is not going away. Find a company that does have proper values. Not all of it is about selling coins. I run a very small DLT operation where we don't even mention crypto or blockchain. We just talk about empowering local communities and restoring biodiversity. We don't associate with Cryptobro's and there's plenty of companies like us. I guess we're just a l…

Share a link to your project?

I appreciate your interest and I wish that I could. But we're not ready for that yet, sorry.
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