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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

It is very dangerous for a blockchain engineer to reveal their line of work.

Do you mind explaining why that is the case ? I don't know anything about blockchains so I couldn't come up with any reason for this.

I think at the moment blockchain is synonymous with "crypto".

Imagine you fell for a ponzi scheme. Now imagine you knew where the person who ran that ponzi scheme was.

The remark is a bit flippant (and feels grammatically incorrect) but the sentiment remains.

Lots of people view crypto as a get-rick-quick scheme on both sides. Even after warnings of "don't put any money in that you aren't comfortable losing" people put in money that they aren't comfortable losing. Coupled with the fact that most of these crypto projects maintain very high levels of community involvement (normally through discord/twitter). Sometimes when people lose a lot of money they lash out at the systems they lost money through. So they turn on the devs of whatever chain/token they gambled on.

Isn't that a little concerning?

It seems less concerning and more BS. I have no idea who would target blockchain engineers or why.

I do understand why "we are fighting the system, this is dangerous" would be a selling point used by employers.

threatening someone who has the ability to intentionally introduce a vulnerability into even a relatively small cryptocurrency probably has the potential to be insanely profitable, and the odds of it even being investigated are far lower than any other form of fraud (for now).

There’s plenty of good reasons to go after some specific blockchain engineers who could do this, but otherwise yeah it seems kind of silly and over dramatic.

If the oversight on your project is so weak that an engineer can add code that steals money without being noticed, all you do is change who profits from the inevitable theft. In fact, if you allow the code to be delivered anonymously, you practically guarantee that smart people will add the vulnerability and steal the money.

I think stronger oversight and less trust is sort of implicit in a pseudo-anonymous model. An attack like I described doesn’t require something as obvious as “code that steals money” either, it could be something much more innocuous that even afterwards appears to have been a mistake. Almost any type of bug combined with a well timed leveraged short position could result in big profits.

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