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Comment by ackbar03 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there is a dichotomy amongst developers over crypto / web3 stuff.

The HN crowd seems to hold a generally negative view on cyptocurrencies and web3 and view it as a bit of scam with no proper use case except to leave someone holding the bag

At the same time there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true.

Does anybody have any insight as to why this is the case? Is somebody missing something?

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I believe many people who hate crypto are the ones that have a good life in a relatively non(or less)-corrupted government-led society, which might be a good reflection of HN demographics. For them, crypto has no value because I think the biggest value proposition is decentralization, which those people don't need as they don't have a corruption problem to solve. They already have a good income, good country and system to live in, etc.

Add the many scams going on in the web3 space and it's easy to see why most people don't like it.

As a developer who started to turn into crypto recently:

I live in a corrupted country with a corrupted government that has too much power and has no good intentions for its people.

I can easily get crypto tokens or some other form of compensation for doing some work for a crypto company, which usually pays much better than regular work, while exploring new ways of thinking about how money and economy works in the first place.

As a developer I feel enthusiastic about everything crypto can offer, and learning more about Solidity development and inter-chain communications and new scalable layers just excite me even more.

There is not a single reason for me to not love crypto.

It's all about demographics.

You're very naive if you think that corrupt governments won't have power over blockchain-based technologies.

You're very naive to think that any authority can have power over distributed technology.

BitTorrent is 20 years old, and today you can still download any movie you want from it. Why hasn't any company or government being able to stop it?

It has largely stopped being common though. The supply has also gone down drastically. It used to be easy to find even confidential movies and download them, even for a non tech family. Nowadays only well informed people keep pirating and non-mainstream supply has gone down so much that it is sometimes impossible to find, which is a shame because that supply is also frequently not available through streaming so you just have some DVD on Amazon.

The crackdown on pirating + streaming together really killed the scene at a point where it's no longer an inconvenience for the market actors.

I would say the same is happening with crypto where KYC and AML rules will progressively apply so that you will still have crypto but the "freedom" or lawless use will be so inconvenient that it won't be a problem for governments and financial actors. It just take time for those rules to be set, but there's really not so many complicated things about it.

The belief that code would beat laws is absurd, in the end you live in a physical world. Sure you could try to have an underground crypto that nobody can use officially but would that really be useful?

Exactly, couldn't have said it better myself.

Pretty sure it was purely affordable streaming that killed bit-torrent. Now that the streaming providers are becoming more disparate, and the old media empires are locking everything up behind ten different streaming platforms, each of which require monthly subscriptions, you'll almost certainly see a resurgence in piracy. It's really just the free market at work ;-)

Depends where you are. Somewhere like Germany you just receive a €300 bill in the mail every time you torrent something, this has a definite chilling effect on torrenting. For crypto, with all transactions being publicly available, I see this being even easier to implement.

Not all cryptocurrencies have public transactions (see Monero for example). And next, you still have to link a wallet with a real person. Might be possible, but not necessarily so.

With BitTorrent, you at least have an IP address, which is easier to link with a real person.

What are you talking about? BitTorrent is absolutely alive and well, and the big sites still have everything you want as soon as it airs.

I'm not talking just popular movies; I was getting Battlebots episodes from Rarbg earlier this year, in 1080p, pretty much as soon as they aired in the US.

You don't need control over the platform. Just penalise the users.

If you can figure out who the users are, yes.

> You're very naive if you think that corrupt governments won't have power over blockchain-based technologies.

In the strictest sense: Yes, with enough coercion, a small blockchain could be influenced. However, from a practical standpoint, it simply makes much more sense for said government to follow the FATF's recommendations & implement a CBDC, no blockchains required.

In fact, combined with AML/KYC, said government wouldn't need to bother with dissidents, as they can simply wipe the balances of anyone they deem a threat towards national security.

You're very naive if you think blockchain technology wouldn't become more privacy-friendly to the extent that governments trying to have power over it practically need to give up because it simply would become economically infeasible for them to do that.

Sure governments can't easily control P2P transactions but as soon as you need money to pay taxes, rent, bills, groceries... cryptocurrencies won't take you very far, especially in a country that's banned them entirely.

If it is a corrupt country, why will the ban be effective? Even asking how they will ban it is an interesting technical question, people would have to be cut off from the internet and anything that can run linux.

I live in Australia, and was interested in buying a privacy oriented cryptocurrency the other day. It was an interesting thing to realise that the government can't stop me in the usual way (regulatory pressure on the exchange to not let me trade) because I can buy ETH then swap that on some shady foreign exchange for what I actually want. Nothing illegal going on there as far as I'm aware, but unless they send in thugs to cut my internet connection there isn't a lot the government can do to control my actions without spending serious money on actually sending people to make me do things I don't want to. It is a nice change of pace from most assets.

Eventually there someone is going to figure out zero-knowledge proofs enough that the tax office can't prove who owns anything or if a capital gain was made. That is going to be an extremely interesting development.

No, they would not need to cut anything off. They'll just need to penalise the usage. They could literally just execute you for the usage.

And, notably, crypto makes it easy to do this years after-the-fact by examining the public ledger. At least if you buy contraband with cash someone would need to compromise the seller or surveil the transaction in real-time to catch you. If you're transacting crypto in a state where transacting crypto is illegal, you're one op-sec failure away from your wallet being linked to your true identity and revealing all past transactions.

Despotism cares little for economic feasibility

At some people they will have to. They have a lot of resources, but not infinite. If cracking down becomes exponentially harder due to network effects and technical reasons, they simply can't go that way.

The problem is not the technology. If you want to use crypto for normal daily stuff you need to spread it among poeple. And the more you spread it among people, the more people will want to regulate it(normal people, users). Because they will not want to lose money or get caught in some stupid crypto schemes

I think education is the key here. Scams will always be there just as they are with fiat money. Crypto makes it easier for scammers, sure, but regulation can only make it a bit harder.

The only way to stop getting caught in schemes is to be educated about how crypto and economics work in the first place.

I'm not talking about EVM-bytecode level or keccak256 implementations of course, but a general understanding of what is what.

How do you want to educate people about crypto if it's still very hard to educate them about normal money?

Crypto is not going to work in the sense the original authors envisioned it. It is trying to solve social problems with very poor technology. Social problems you want to be solving differently to be successful

how do you regulate crypto in the corrupted country with corrupted govt? How people want to regulate it this way in a such country?

Your example makes sense in countries like Canada ( till 2021 ). Who knows when US or Germany or other west country will start to play against their citizens like in Canada?

I think probably faster than later because it goes into comunist like states direction where country want to run every citizen life ... like it happened in Poland after II-WW

Monero already exists. Why hasn’t it won?

Because it has 0 exposure in the oversaturated market.

Then how would a different privacy-preserving coin get adopted? If all it takes for a privacy-preserving coin to fail is other coins in the market, then I don't think it is naive to consider the possibility that "blockchain technology wouldn't become more privacy-friendly to the extent that governments trying to have power over it practically need to give up".

Governments can do this: https://xkcd.com/538/

> practically need to give up because it simply would become economically infeasible for them to do that.

Wars are economically unfeasible. Didn't stop governments from waging them.

War can be extremely profitable.

All cryptography is vulnerable to a technique canonically called "rubber hose cryptography," which is where you beat someone with a rubber hose until they give you the key. It's so effective it can even break post-quantum algorithms without a quantum computer!

Governments have plenty of rubber hoses, and guns.

The idea that non-technical people with no infosec / netsec / tradecraft knowledge could use any form of crypto within a regime that banned it aggressively without placing themselves in massive jeopardy is the height of looney tunes techno-utopianism. Keep in mind that these are usually nations that lack little things like habeas corpus, due process of law, or in some cases any rule of law whatsoever. If the government doesn't like what you are doing they disappear or kill you.

Sure but you must be very wary that this all may be temporary.

Your government may decide to crack down on crypto, making it difficult to convert to your local currency (as many countries do with USD).

The crypto world in the US may very well be a bubble that will burst at some point.

Sure, it might be temporary, but it makes government's job much more difficult as opposed to traditional centralized systems.

And as web3 progresses, the line between the Internet and cryptocurrencies will blur even more, making it hard to define laws around crypto without banning access to the Internet in the first place, which will make their job even harder, which is good in terms of taking power back from authoritarian goverments.

The whole financial sector in the U.S. is a bubble that will burst at some point. Have already lived through one of those just 14 years ago. And now we're getting elevated inflation, multiple international currencies experiencing hyperinflation, etc.

Crypto is at least transparent and fully auditable. Loans stay solvent as they are over collateralized and automatically liquidated when they become close to under collateralization. As a result, the crypto space has and will go through many mini bubbles that resolve themselves very quickly.

Crypto and blockchain are fundamentally transformative technologies. The U.S. government will make moves to co-opt it, via stable coin regulation, but they won't be able to fully control the space. It is truly international in scope, and runs on math and cryptography. They can scarcely ban seed phrases, or blockchain in general, as it is fundamentally a form of speech.

> I believe many people who hate crypto are the ones that have a good life in a relatively non(or less)-corrupted government-led society, which might be a good reflection of HN demographics.

Maybe. I hear this a lot too. But as a counterpoint, I happen to live in the USA, and have a pretty good life. I know a LOT of people who have good lives in this relatively uncorrupted society who are going into web3. And who are funded by very well off people in said country.

I'm not saying that web3 can't help people in bad countries. It's that I don't think that's the end goal of a lot of this enthusiasm. Because I don't think those people were trying to help out people in your country before crypto existed (not verified, but I think this is a reasonable belief).

> At the same time there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true.

Crypto companies are overfunded by VCs and offer amazing packages, more than FAANG in many cases, plus the token upside. Who doesn't want to make a quick buck?

Also, it's pretty interesting technology that can be fun to work with. Even if it's useless, it scratches the itch of working on something deeply technical instead of the boring old web technologies.

And if you ever get bored of your overpaid crypto job, just pretend to get hacked and walk away with the company's cold wallet.

For the same reason people work on adTech at facebook. Hint: it's not because they just love advertising.

Bonus points for those who work at an ad-supported company while using an adblocker themselves.

Let he who is without sin throw the first stone.

'web3' companies get a lot of funding and are able to pay $250k+ cash. That's it.

This. Web3 companies are willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money plus they are willing to pay those high salaries no-matter where you are based.

The fully remote salaries I've seen recently for Web3 jobs almost makes me want to make the switch.

So you think most of them are purely drawn to the money? You think any of them actually thought "hey there might be something to this" after working on this stuff for some time?

Just to be clear I don't really have a side. I'm just curious since I'm not really at the front lines of this stuff

I suspect most of the devs in this space are actually agnostic to this. Enough money for the company to exist for the foreseeable future, big enough compensation, and tech problems abstracted away enough from the end result to be interesting in themselves; all of this can make it quite compelling. Just like you don't have to use Netflix or even enjoy video content to work for them, you don't have to even care about web3 and its future to work in it.

you are asking this question in an echo-chamber. :)

you’ll find a lot of developers who feel there is plenty of interesting work in blockchains and crypto. one example is zero knowledge research and how it applies to crypto (zk rollups, zkEVM, privacy-preserving attestations and financial proofs, etc).

eg: https://0xparc.org/blog

I think there's a combination of both. I'm interested by the concept of the blockchain but I'm also apprehensive of the companies/projects that are created on it (for a lot of the reasons outlined in the original post).

However offering £150K + sign on bonus is enough for a lot of people (maybe even me) to overlook these issues and jump in for short term gain and the possibility of massive long term gains.

If they paid the same as a traditional startup the equation would be different and I think you would see less people making the switch.

Where is this information coming from?

This absolutely does not mirror my experience. Most Web3 companies, even VC funded, can't offer even close to FAANG.

Do you have an example of such company?

Kraken and Coinbase?

But yes I feel that 250k+ salaries are outliers, most of these companies are just smart enough to hire remote-first, and 150k or even 100k takes you pretty far if you hire outside the US.

That's why the claim above that big tech employees would be jumping ship to web3 opportunities sounds far-fetched, even anecdotally my friends making 2-3-400k at "web2" companies are definitely not going anywhere near web3.

Kraken and Coinbase are hardly Web3 companies. They are somewhere in the middle.

Web3 is about writing, deploying and auditing smart contracts, or writing L1/L2s, and writing platform-specific SDKs.

https://thedefiant.io/web3-soaring-salaries/

https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1495449902968885248

Opportunity for huge pay out. Unlike web2 startups, web3 startups provide token based ownership. It is more easily liquidated. Vesting periods are shorter for tokens.

They have potentially no limit on the ceiling for token valuation while a similar company on public market will depend on fundamentals for its valuation.

If you are on a web3 rocketship, the chances of you cashing out is much higher than otherwise similar web2 startup.

Similarly, you also have more control over the direction of the company via DAO voting. You can protect your bags from getting diluted.

I'd say there's also a ton of interesting work to be done, especially on L1: cryptography, distributed storage, peer-to-peer networks etc.

Scaling L1 is a tough-to-impossible proposition. There's just no way to store everyone's transactions on everyone's computers.

It's not about storing everyones transactions on everyones computers. It's about distributing it to enough computers in order for transactions to be safe and fast. Algorand seems to handle this on L1 just fine.

A lot of alt-L1s claim to scale however they usually sacrifice decentralization which completely degenerates the network to an inefficient database.

The challenge of decentralized scaling - https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/vision/

Are you specifically answering this about Algorand or are you thinking of other platforms? Algorand seems to be sufficiently decentralized, and I wouldn't describe it as "an inefficient database", but I'm happy to be proven wrong if you have evidence of otherwise.

> Scaling L1 is a tough-to-impossible proposition. There's just no way to store everyone's transactions on everyone's computers.

This is the comment that made me sign up for an account: Thanks for doing that, danuker ;)

In the most strictest sense: Yes, it is impossible to store all transactional data on just one computer, just like it would inevitably be impossible for one server/database to host an entire company's data.

The conventional way of doing this would be to shard the database so that it could be spread out amongst multiple servers, simple enough. This can't be done directly in a trustless system, however: Additional checks, data structures, & procedures need to be created so that it can be allowed to do so.

At a high level overview, data availability sampling [0][1] is required to make the attempt possible. When combined with Verkle trees [2][3] (Merkle trees + zk proofs) however, further improvements towards the number of possible shards could be made, increasing the storage capacity of the entire network even further.

[0] https://hackmd.io/@vbuterin/sharding_proposal#:~:text=ELI5%3... [1] https://near.org/papers/nightshade/#state-validity-and-data-...

[2] https://dankradfeist.de/ethereum/2021/06/18/pcs-multiproofs.... [3] https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/06/18/verkle.html

what is the value of the underlying token if not the usefulness of the associated project?

The ability to offload it onto retail suckers before the price collapses.

Why do people work on weapons of mass destruction, despite the obvious harm that they cause to mostly innocent people?

Not everyone cares about the moral high ground. Statistically, about 5% of the population don't. So then web3.0 is extremely high pay + downside you don't care about.

"a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies"

? Yes, money.

This is not a dichotomy.

Most people are not ideological and don't care about meta issues.

Even those with opinions can be convinced quickly of something else with a huge paycheque.

Because Crypto is not directly fraudulent, and you can talk about it superficially as being beneficial, well, people will participate.

Money is a great motivator.

For the devs it can be a blend of excitement + ignorance/belief + greed.

HN has its own groupthink. For crypto it's that it's all coal powered shiba shitcoins.

There was likely a similar group of people bitching in 1999. The dotcom bubble did happen, and yet dot coms also happened.

The point is that to see the upside, you need to evaluate what new capabilities the tech offers, whether they're interesting, and who is doing the real work (if it exists).

It's another gold / oil rush, but this time the "resource" is electricity (actually coal and other stuff being burned). There's a lot of money in crypto at the moment so engineers and VCs will naturally chase it until governments put an end to it (I'm not condoning or opposing it, I'm just saying it will happen).

None of the innovation in the "Web3 space" relies on proof-of-work. It's all various forms of stake-based consensus now.

So? Doesn’t make any less complicated. Kiss

Couldn't you replace crypto with "advertising-funded walled gardens that promote addictive rage and conspiracy theories while passing all your details onto oppressive governments" and describe the last decade in the same way?

They were also going to change the world (I'm not sure if they specified for the better).

There are people with different attitudes on different issues.

For instance, I believe crypto "dividends" or "yields" are a zero-sum game, diluting the limited savings of have-nots to enrich the haves. For example ETH staking, where to avoid middlemen, you have to stake 32 ETH.

But I believe cryptocurrency as an asset is well worth it, for the competition it provides to national currencies. If these decide to overinflate, crypto provides you with a relatively-uninflated asset (though its value also depends to an extent on the liquidity of national currencies, as well as fickle bandwagon effects).

Then again, given enough pay, I might consider helping some "entrepreneur" of the zero-sum variety.

> For example ETH staking, where to avoid middlemen, you have to stake 32 ETH.

end goal would be more usage of decentralized staking pools, see Rocket Pool. this way, the ‘middleman’ is a set of smart contracts; the validators (who only require 16ETH) take a slightly higher fee than stakers (who can stake as low as 0.01ETH), for their services rendered (burden of additional maintenance, technical expertise and risk involved with running a validator).

But I do feel that centralized staking (CEX, Lido) poses a risk to the network.

> But I believe cryptocurrency as an asset is well worth it, for the competition it provides to national currencies. If these decide to overinflate, crypto provides you with a relatively-uninflated asset

Given their volatilities, cryptocurrencies are neither inflation hedges nor currencies. Somebody with a bunch of USD trying to hedge inflation will buy gold or real estate before they buy cryptocurrencies.

> At the same time there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true.

I'm interviewing right now at a large-ish cryptocurrency company. I'm currently an exhausted L6 at a FAANG.

The promise of fewer working hours and no on-call rota is very attractive to me, as well as the ability to start with Go f/time[1] on mostly greenfield[2] projects.

[1] Team I am on has agreed long before I joined to use nothing but Java.

[2] I'm also tired, after decades in the industry, of mostly maintaining existing products. The chance to create new stuff from scratch is very attractive.

The negative sides are very loud, making HN a place that isn't very nice to talk about technical details. You only see the comments people post. HN, like most places, mostly doesn't have a very good understanding of the underlying technology and enjoys the pithy hot takes. "An NFT is just _bad analogy_" is everywhere, and other complaints often read like "Rails? People make blogs with that and I saw a load of blogs filled with spam, I don't like rails".

> At the same time there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true.

People build plenty of things for companies without necessarily being wide eyed believers in some honourable quest.

For me, there are a few key things

1. Obviously pay.

My family are the most important thing here, and people pay me money to write code & solve problems for them. Money can be exchanged for goods and services.

2. It's an interesting space.

You've got a global database with row level security for modifications and stored procedures. Everyone uses key based security. On top, the database is slow, those stored procedures have very strict limits and computations need to be heavily optimised. Everything is public. There are now multiple linked databases with different tradeoffs. How do you mix those? How do you ensure safety, security, validity? How do you do off-chain computation and get the results back on chain?

3. It's new.

Do you know what happens if I come up with a great new technical idea in most development? It's either a bad idea for reasons others have discovered already or someone has already implemented it better than I could. It often requires very deep expertise to do something truly new. On the crypto side, I've come up with things that are (as far as I can tell) brand new. I find building to be more fun than configuring, and you need to build new things in this space.

4. It's changing fast.

There are things you can do now you couldn't do 6 months ago, a year ago, two years ago. The space is very active.

I don't know if it'll be the foundation of everything in 10 years, a distant memory of "oh yeah people tried that didn't they" or if I'll be like COBOL programmers fixing legacy weird systems from an ill fated project. All I know is it's _fun_ and _hard_ and people pay me to do it.

For a community that builds so many things just to see if they can, I find it quite surprising that so many coders aren't even curious.

HN has hated Bitcoin since before there was any reason to hate it. In the very early days there was a positive attitude. However, since the price started to reach double digits, the attitude became sharply negative and that has stuck for the last 10 years. Some HN thought leaders declared Bitcoin a tulip bubble when the price was 1000x smaller than it is now.

There are legitimate criticisms of cryptocurrency but the attitude here is more of a hardened loathing punctuated with a minority of more open minded people.

> Some HN thought leaders declared Bitcoin a tulip bubble when the price was 1000x smaller than it is now.

I don't know that I understand the point you're making. The fundamentals of Bitcoin haven't changed, and it is worse than a tulip bubble.

There has only been one tulip mania. Bitcoin on the other hand has gone through a few boom and bust cycles by now. This implies that it's probably not very helpful to compare the two.

Growing tulips REMOVES carbon from the atmosphere.

Haha yeah I guess that's true, but I would be surprised if it's a net positive once you factor in transport to the customer. I guess we need a Proof of Carbon Removal consensus algorithm based coin ;)

Extreme libertarianism is divisive, and that was the culture of Bitcoin fans from the early days. It created a negative first impression for people who don’t agree politically.

> In the very early days there was a positive attitude. However, since the price started to reach double digits, the attitude became sharply negative

From an ecologic point of view, this makes sense. The amount of electric power used by the Bitcoin network tends towards the amount of electric power one can buy with the block reward and fees. While the Bitcoin price was in the single digits, this was not an issue, since even with the higher block reward back then, the amount of electricity one could buy with it was low. Once the Bitcoin price started climbing higher and higher, however, the total amount of power used by Bitcoin miners became significant.

The utility of Bitcoin is the same no matter its price; but its negative environmental cost is proportional to its price. It's natural that the attitude to it becomes negative once its downsides (proportional to its price) increase while its upsides stay the same (though one could argue that its upsides also have reduced with higher prices).

Note that the 4 reasons you've listed have little to do with the technical merits of what you're working on. If anything, your point 2 and 3 talks more about the drawbacks of the technologies you're using rather than their advantages.

If by technical merits you mean "the tools all already exist" then sure, that's a drawback. But those tools don't create themselves, if nobody works in an area because they can't just install a settled on solution they'd never get built. ML didn't have the tooling it has now when I started with it, using recently released cuda to implement these new "deep neural networks" (more called RBMs at the time I think) on graphics cards because I needed them faster than the released MATLAB code - but now you can pip install huggingface and be away. When I was doing it, ML could have remained a niche area (people always asked me if AI was to do with aliens, and wondered what on earth I'd do with that degree) but has exploded after it hit critical thresholds.

Maybe this will happen with crypto stuff. Maybe not. I've been very wrong on cryptos growth since the early days.

But, people have business ideas and want them built. I'm building those while solving new interesting problems. Does that really sound so bad as a job?

I'm not talking about my specific client work because I don't want anything to come across as shilling.

> If by technical merits you mean "the tools all already exist"

I mean the technologies that define this space, e.g. blockchains, ERC20 tokens, NFTs, and so on. I mean that in your comment, you didn't try to claim that these technologies were worth anything in themselves, just that there is a demand for them.

> But, people have business ideas and want them built. I'm building those while solving new interesting problems. Does that really sound so bad as a job?

No, but then you're also not in disagreement with people who find these technologies to be mostly a dead-end, since you just ignore how relevant these technologies are, you abstract away from the business requirements defined by somebody else.

Because I'm answering about why I work in the space currently. You're reading into what I've not said.

> I mean that in your comment, you didn't try to claim that these technologies were worth anything in themselves,

What's the value "in itself" of postgres? The value comes from what you can build with it, what problems you can solve.

> just that there is a demand for them.

Because people want to build things and those are solutions to problems they face. That's why there's demand for them.

> No, but then you're also not in disagreement with people who find these technologies to be mostly a dead-end,

Again you're reading into things I've not written. Not knowing the long term future of this doesn't mean I agree it's mostly useless.

> since you just ignore how relevant these technologies are

Relevant in what way? To whom? They're certainly relevant if you want to integrate with any other projects in the area.

>you abstract away from the business requirements defined by somebody else.

The business requirements are defined by the business, yes.

I can feel this building to a statement about how you can use other technology to solve any particular problem, so I'll come in front of that and say yes - you can always build things using other tools, blockchains aren't magic they're just code.

I have learned that the more I mention cryptocurrency or even decentralized anything the more likely my comment is to be buried. So I would say cryptocurrency enthusiasts are sort of suppressing themselves.

I have been running a business with payments in micro transactions on Algorand for a few months. It's not something that would be remotely possible without cryptocurrency.

It's true that there are a lot of scams and nonsense, but I know for a fact that there are real artists using smart contracts to sell their art frictionlessly and engage with their community in ways that are again, impossible without this technology.

But to go back to the original point, writing this kind of thing on HN, there is a real chance the comment will be downvoted quite a lot.

There are legit projects. There are many bad projects. HN people generalize and the ones that know the legit projects understand discussing is a waste of time.

> there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true.

Why would you assume that, though?

I've never seen an actual statistic on this. I mean, I'm sure there's greater than zero, but never solid evidence for "a lot".

It's to the point where the increasing anecdotes and ongoing absence of any harder numbers leads me to think it's negligible.

Back here in the world, crypto on a dev CV is a red flag.

I don't feel like those two sentences pose a dichotomy. In the same way that I think Amazon is hell on earth but would very likely work for them simply because working in a capitalist system means you'll always be contributing to harm somewhere, the only difference is in intensity or directness. From my perspective someone can think crypto is a net loss to society and still work on a company that uses it for a multitude of reasons, with circumstance being one of them.

I wonder if the nocoiners here are aware that YCombinator is incubating a lot of crypto startups. Coinbase is a YCombinator company.

That's nocoalers, not nocoiners. Bitcoin is China's way of exporting coal through the atmosphere. Proof of Waste is what PoW really stands for, and Proof of Stake has always been a pipe dream that's never been delivered, and it has its own terrible problems, like being Oligarchy on Steroids.

Source?

To everyone who keeps repeating the same energy-related arguments against BTC, I want you to read this:

https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html

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