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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?

#241

Post by latchkey »

wasmitnetzen wrote: post #153
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…

I feel like it's a bit naive to expect that the crypto world can evade the authorities forever. You need a registered office and executives and lawyers to run any big company, and thus the authorities and laws have a way in. The laws governing the existing banking system are not an intrinsic property, the crypto world will have the same laws eventually, just on a slightly different technical platform.

Not evade. Just give me control of my own funds such that nobody can just empty my account without at least giving me notice first. As you can imagine, that is a quite disturbing and disruptive event.

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

#242

Post by chillacy »

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.

By extension what do you think about people living comfortably in the United States and benefiting economically (and indirectly helping prop) the military industrial complex?

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

#243

Post by peyton »

Thlom wrote: post #60
capkutay wrote: post #44

Zoom and Netflix both lost 60-80% of their value in the last year and I don't see anyone declaring them dead. I don't work in crypto but I think there's a bit of a knee jerk reaction to seeing all the vaporware projects being wiped out (rightfully so). Consolidation and pruning of wasteful projects is good. If you feel like the work you're personally doing is positive, then don't worry about people dancing on the gra…

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…

Plain old databases cut secret deals with Citadel.

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

#244

Post by peyton »

mmcnl wrote: post #174
hirako2000 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be your own bank cannot be solved by a plain database, as it doesn't ship with the trustless features most blockchain networks offer. The network is there. When bitcoin came out it solved that problem but the network took years to expand enough to guarantee integrity. That's what has been happening in crypto, in the early years, network expansion, fed by speculative investment (speculation can have its merit, see). T…

What problem does being your own bank solve? You're posing crypto as a solution to crypto-defined problems that no one actually has. How does crypto improve my life? How will it make me happier, healthier and how will it help me contribute more to the wellbeing of others and the planet? I can easily answer this question for PostgreSQL.

I won’t make secret deals with Citadel. Unlike my broker.

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

#245

Post by latchkey »

hestefisk wrote: post #124
granddemolisher wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same is true for Bangladesh, India, Philippines, etc. They all have good Internet connectivity but too many unbanked people.

Mobile wallets are quite popular for the unbanked in those countries. You don’t need a decentralised ledger for that.

The banks are awful and have been known to go out of business and take peoples money with them. The concept of FDIC insurance doesn’t exist. Also, good luck getting an account when you don’t have an address.

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

#246

Post by s1k3s »

The company you work for doesn't want to use the "technology and ideology" for anything other than own profit. It's why they are a company. If you don't like working for them but you like the tech, find a job in another field and just experiment with the tech on your own time. Or launch a startup that you feel it's game changing with that technology.

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

#247

Post by latchkey »

roflyear wrote: post #221
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…

Yah bc when you get scammed in crypto no one can get your money back! Lmao.

Agreed. Wallet security needs to improve.

That said, my company was recently scammed with a phishing attack where we were sent an invoice from one of our vendors. Someone had hacked the vendors accounting firm and we paid it to an different account number, get this… in the same bank. So, scammers were able to create an account, with kyc in the same bank. Crazy.

We are struggling to get the money back now.

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

#248

Post by wespiser_2018 »

I think you should get out. We are at a critical point now where the criticism for crypto has hit the mainstream, and over the last market cycle that criticism was proven to be true: that crypto is largely predatory in nature and has few if any real world applications has been proven out. Maybe your project is different, but the industry works in some pretty dark ways.

There are lots of informed crypto skeptics that understand finance, economics, and distributed systems enough to know that crypto is not going to work as it's sold to retail investors, and their voices grow louder everyday. Plenty of these critics, like myself, have experience working on crypto projects or have a background in SWE, distributed systems, and VC funded start ups. Working on crypto in 2016 is a much different ethical dilemma than working in the space in 2021, or even 2023. We simply know more, and right now we're watching the bodies rack up as the market experiences cascade failures.

Of course, if you 100% believe in a technology and think it has a future, then by all means keep working in that space. However, leaving is not impossible. There's such a need for senior devs that working on un-ethical projects isn't an unsurmountable goal.

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

#249

Post by cldellow »

hirako2000 wrote: post #226
mmcnl wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What problem does being your own bank solve? You're posing crypto as a solution to crypto-defined problems that no one actually has. How does crypto improve my life? How will it make me happier, healthier and how will it help me contribute more to the wellbeing of others and the planet? I can easily answer this question for PostgreSQL.

Well over 1B people remains unbanked, either excluded from banking or due to non intentional accessibility issues. That alone means crypto may be a solution to a signicant issue so many are having. Would that be enough? Even among the banked, and in the very developed world, the traditional system has caused the loss of people' life long savings, loss of the ability to even continue business operations, that day some…

> the main original author of this software was/is a hero in the fight against system oppression

...is this a reference to Assange? IIRC, his contributions were ~0.7% of the commits in 1996, focused on psql and libpq. Promoting him to "main original author" is quite a leap.

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

#250

Post by olalonde »

mmcnl wrote: post #177
olalonde wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use case: decentralized, censorship-resistant, programmable money. Sorry if it takes more than a decade to disrupt the most entrenched and powerful status quo on earth. Personally, I never thought it would come this far so quickly, and am quite happy with the pace of adoption and progress.

A very important part of any use case is that you clearly define a goal. What is the goal of "decentralized, censorship-resistant, programmable money"? These are crypto invented words that have no meaning outside of the crypto ecosystem.

That's incorrect. Decoupling money from the government is a goal that predates crypto by quite a bit[0][1].

For most people in the first world, cryptocurrency is not an app that will instantly make your life better like Airbnb or Uber. It's a lot more deep and abstract than that. The idea is to separate money from the government. If you don't value financial privacy or don't think the government's ability to arbitrarily inflate the money supply is problematic, it's going to be hard to convince you. How would you respond to someone in China asking: "How does free speech make my life better?" or "How does democracy make my life better?". It's not really a question that can be easily answered with an elevator pitch.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Federal_Reser...

[1] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

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