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Comment by praptak | Hacker News Reader

To someone not familiar with Haskell funding, can anybody explain the quote below?

"For a while it has been a public secret the Haskell ecosystem has become increasingly entangled with an unsavoury variety in the cryptocurrency sector as one of primary mechanisms for funding development."

I mean, what exactly is this "unsavoury variety in the cryptocurrency sector" and how is Haskell tied to it?

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If you write Haskell and want a job, most of the positions available are with crypto related companies.

This sheds some light on the topic - thanks. Still, the author states that Haskell's reputation is used to legitimize bad business. It seems to me that shady companies using the language internally is not enough to raise alarm about it.

Is there some kind of (un-)official sponsorship from (supposedly) shady actors?

Maybe it’s about the metaphorical ed whom is neither an elephant nor responsible for crypto’s thirst....

Haskell isn't that large of a language. I'm not confident if the heavy usage by shady crpyto companies is enough to ruin the image of a language but I think at the very least the advice to not depend on it financially to grow the community is a sound one.

Worked at a Haskell crypto startup. Your analysis of cause and effect is wrong -- crypto people are attracted to Haskell because it has features that are excellent for the domain, not because they are interested in "copping shine" from it or whatever.

To be clear, it's the author's analysis, which I'm trying to understand, not mine.

I'm not sure where you are - but that's not true in London (source: been working here a long time, plus have been hiring for Haskell recently)

the morality and potentially negative effects of finance are real but if Haskell wants a gold-niche to appear worthy for the mainstream world then it's a very potent one.

Also, since it might be unfamiliar to many, here's another article that puts forward a criticism of Bitcoin, many of which are for ethical issues:

https://blog.habets.se/2017/11/Why-bitcoin-is-terrible.html

It's about bitcoin, and not everything applies to other cryptocurrencies, but most of these arguments do apply.

It doesn't really have anything to do with the article though. It's just an anti-bitcoin article of which there are many. The article here is about cryptocurrencies that pull in money through ICOs and that turn out to be fraudulent and that use Haskell and sprinkle some right wing politics on top. In the end the article doesn't really say anything if you ask me and I don't really see the link with Haskell. Haskell just has properties well suited for cryptocurrencies so it gets used more than certain other programming languages for this specific purpose. This seems more like the author disagreeing with consultants, who happen to use Haskell, that take on (according to him) dubious jobs.

Most people can read "unsavoury variety in the cryptocurrency sector" as everything except bitcoin. A minority of people will read it as "all crypto", and if you're reading it as "only shitcoins" you're probably a little unsavoury yourself.

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