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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?

#161

Post by popcorncowboy »

jeroenhd wrote: post #97

I'm one of the "haters". I see no value in crypto in 99.99% of crypto and in the cases that do make sense the actual use for it is borderline money laundering or tax evasion. All the "enthusiasts" seem to want to get rich by getting as many people as they can in their greater fool scheme of choice in the hopes of becoming a Bitcoin billionaire. The obnoxious fan base and practical scams coming out of the marketing de…

> I don't foster any negative feelings towards developers per se. A job's a job

Nah. This line of reasoning excuses any activity one might be involved with because "it's just my job". Doesn't work like that. The idea that you carry zero moral (or ethical or even legal) culpability because you're drawing a paycheck and being "told" what to do is what every person working for the companies that are deeply damaging our society tells themselves. Because the alternative (the reality) is really hard to deal with.

GP is right to be concerned.

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

#162

Post by ETH_start »

ogogmad wrote: post #114
ETH_start wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ETH launched in 2015, which is 7 years ago, and has been working through fundamental limitations of the technology, building out the technological primitives that will enable mass-consumer blockchain applications in the future. 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 lan…

I'm still not sure why all of that is useful. A lot of clever infrastructure, but for exactly what? Also, it's worth reminding people that ETH might be useful, but still worth less than its current price. There's a ton of speculation propping up the current price.

Right now Ethereum is only useful for niche applications, like using your ETH as collateral for an autonomously issued DAI loan.

This is because its disadvantages, like lack of privacy and very limited throughput capacity, make traditional finance better for all but the highest value blockchain applications, where the extreme integrity of process provided by its highly redundant and collectively managed ledger outweighs its disadvantages, like extremely narrow write bandwidth.

But once those disadvantages disappear, as a result of the aforementioned infrastructure development, I believe that will change, and we'll see Ethereum's advantages make it the preferred platform for mass-consumer applications.

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

#163

Post by barnabee »

tigershark wrote: post #147
granddemolisher wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That’s more of a demonstration that code is law but laws can change by the consensus of the participants, measured transparently and verifiable by their willingness to mine the fork.

That was the system working as intended, even if not everyone in the community agrees with it.

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

#164

Post by Kiro »

andruby wrote: post #136

Sometime in 2013 I was doubting to work with crypto. What made it clear for me, and this is the advice I still give friends today: Ask yourself this. Regardless of wether crypto pricing goes up or down, regardless of wether there is major adoption or not. Will I get satisfaction from having built X? Will I look back after a decade and be grateful about my contribution? So far, for me , the answer has been a no. I hav…

Who has the luxury to work on something that fulfils those criteria? If I would follow your advice I would be homeless.

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

#165

Post by charcircuit »

tgv wrote: post #157
jeroenhd wrote: post #97

I'm one of the "haters". I see no value in crypto in 99.99% of crypto and in the cases that do make sense the actual use for it is borderline money laundering or tax evasion. All the "enthusiasts" seem to want to get rich by getting as many people as they can in their greater fool scheme of choice in the hopes of becoming a Bitcoin billionaire. The obnoxious fan base and practical scams coming out of the marketing de…

> A job's a job That's something that doesn't sit well with me. Not all jobs are equal. Some are unethical, or worse. And OP is in the unethical camp, at least by association, and also tarred by the stereotypes of exploitation and fraud. > Anyone refusing you simply because you worked in crypto at some point is short-sighted. I would also not want to hire/work with anyone who's worked for facebook or google in the pa…

>I would also not want to hire/work with anyone who's worked for facebook or google in the past 5 years

These companies have a plethora of things to work on and you have the ability to positively impact most of the planet (billions of people). You are oversimplifing things if you think they are all evil people who would be bad to work with.

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

#166

Post by walrus01 »

wild-eep wrote: post #31

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 gros…

> 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.

When a description such as that starts to sound like a 1:1 Venn diagram overlap with multi level marketing, yeah, it's time to bail.

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

#168

Post by aetherane »

rglullis wrote: post #101
Bilal_io wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't work for any of these companies, and I wanted to do so in the past, but not anymore. Maybe Microsoft is an exception, and that's open to change. I personally do care about the "evil" stuff they do, especially when it comes to privacy and monopolistic practices, but I would never attack or shame anyone for working their, everyone makes their own choice.

The "evil" things done by Big Tech are possible because of the people working there. No matter how "well-intentioned" they are, if their cushy jobs with high compensation salaries are only possible because of the lucrative "evil" things done by the company, they deserve as much scorn as their bosses.

If you work on improving security on a big tech product are you "evil"? If you work on education programs for these companies, are you evil?

It is a big generalization to say everyone who works for these companies is contributing to it's evil. Most people are actually trying to make improvements for users.

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

#169

Post by rglullis »

aetherane wrote: post #168
rglullis wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "evil" things done by Big Tech are possible because of the people working there. No matter how "well-intentioned" they are, if their cushy jobs with high compensation salaries are only possible because of the lucrative "evil" things done by the company, they deserve as much scorn as their bosses.

If you work on improving security on a big tech product are you "evil"? If you work on education programs for these companies, are you evil? It is a big generalization to say everyone who works for these companies is contributing to it's evil. Most people are actually trying to make improvements for users.

If you wouldn't do the work without the paycheck from the evil corp, you are complicit into the evil doings.

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

#170

Post by tgv »

charcircuit wrote: post #165
tgv wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A job's a job That's something that doesn't sit well with me. Not all jobs are equal. Some are unethical, or worse. And OP is in the unethical camp, at least by association, and also tarred by the stereotypes of exploitation and fraud. > Anyone refusing you simply because you worked in crypto at some point is short-sighted. I would also not want to hire/work with anyone who's worked for facebook or google in the pa…

>I would also not want to hire/work with anyone who's worked for facebook or google in the past 5 years These companies have a plethora of things to work on and you have the ability to positively impact most of the planet (billions of people). You are oversimplifing things if you think they are all evil people who would be bad to work with.

> you have the ability to positively impact most of the planet (billions of people)

Hundreds of thousands of people work there, yet they haven't managed to achieve that positive impact.

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