Comment by sdiacom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdiacom | Hacker News Reader

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I hang out in spaces for people entering tech, and I see the crypto advocates and grifters creeping in and around these spaces. It's extremely successful. Lately, I'm even seeing crypto grifts specifically aimed at people entering tech from non-traditional backgrounds, weaponising the language and discourse of diversity and empowerment to trick them into not just buying into the grift, but code the grift for them.

For someone entering tech, everything they see is new and exciting and mystical and hard to understand. Without prior context, it's hard to see why overengineered crypto nonsense is different from all the other overengineered nonsense they're learning about at break-neck speed. For many of them, the only reason to enter tech to begin with is to earn a decent living. They lack the technical background to understand if what they're being paid to build is a grift or a legitimate business, and in the current market, it's increasingly in their best interest to not understand the difference.

I believe we lost when we collectively accepted "software is eating the world" as an inevitable positive maxim of our reality. In retrospect, it seems self-evident that the end stage of this ideology-slash-self-fulfilling-prophecy is a socially-legitimized software-based "value" chain that ingests raw wealth and produces absolutely nothing of value.

I wouldn't really worry about people with a college degree. At one point or another you remember you classes on distributed systems and you realize the entire space is bullshit. I agree we'll see bootcamp grads and other people from non-traditional backgrounds get burned but it also gives them opportunities that wouldn't exist otherwise, so I'm not sure it's a net negative overall.

The much bigger issue lies within politicians, the media and the general public who still believe we should let the scams happen for the sake of innovation, despite zero evidence thereof. Sadly I think we need a few more catastrophic events like FTX before people understand there's nothing to salvage.

Are you sure that college degrees inoculate people against bullshit?

Of course not, I've seen crackpots at every level, especially PhDs/postdocs/professors when their lab's funding depended on exploring bullshit ideas.

However I see a strong negative correlation between CS literacy and gullibility regarding blockchains and web3. HN is a good illustration of this, crypto-cultists are always surprised so many people on here aren't buying any of it.

> I wouldn't really worry about people with a college degree. At one point or another you remember you classes on distributed systems and you realize the entire space is bullshit.

The number of people in the space with degrees from major CS programs suggests that we shouldn’t be confident about that. Smart people can talk themselves into a lot when there’s the prospect of being rich, and the poor architectural fit of blockchains for most application led means there are plenty of distracting hard problems to work on rather than question the entire system.

This number is relatively small in my experience. I work on data intensive applications so I guess my department shows some selection bias, but I have yet to run into an intern or junior who thinks blockchains are a solution to anything worth solving.

I studied CS and worked at 2 FAANGS before joining Coinbase in 2020 then a blockchain layer 1 a couple of months ago. Coinbase made me multiple 7 figures on IPO day and even with the crypto crash my current job has a cash salary of $350k and ~$200k in tokens.

Yes the tech is not usually innovative or groundbreaking but nothing I worked on in my web2 career or college was cutting edge either.

When looking for a new job this year I got a l6 offer at meta, senior at apple, staff cloudflare and a couple of startup offers. Not only was the base pay significantly less, the tech and companies were boring, most required in office attendance.

So I went with a blockchain company because they were chill, fully distributed, pay was high, and work interesting (we use a lot of cryptography, I have 2 phd’s on my team).

Am I a cryptobro believing this field is the future? No it could all go to zero. Has crypto allowed me to retire and make more money than nearly every colleague in university and FAANGS? Yes.

In other words, “yes I’m helping grifters scam people, but it sure pays well.”

Pretty much. After watching the Sackler family escape with billions despite destroying America with opioids I’ve come to the conclusion that America is garbage and there is nothing important here except money. I’m securing my family and their future, nothing else.

But yeah crypto grifts sucks but my college roommate now works at Goldman Sachs, an old university TA works Exxon offshore drilling, a couple of classmates are African logistics specialists (acquire land at ANY cost including literally lying to poor peasants to sign over property) at Bain. Is there a ranking for better or worse?

All of capitalism and by extension society is rotten to the core.

This reminds me of the speech in The West Wing, where the president explains his reasoning for accepting the censure.

No one takes responsibility for anything anymore. We foster, we obfuscate, we rationalise. "Everybody does it." That's what we say. So we come to occupy a moral safe house where everyone's to blame so no one's guilty. I'm to blame. I was wrong.

If at the end of the day you can sleep well, more power to you! But things will continue to decline if everyone's only looking out for themselves.

I work in crypto (for a company that does market making) and I don't think I'm doing philanthropic work, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking it's any less ethical than working for MANGA.

anyone can say all these things

But Yao42 works at Coinbase, and I want to know his point of view on why he says this.

Am I a cryptobro believing this field is the future? No it could all go to zero//

why it could all go to zero ?

I'm not so sure about this. I don't have a college degree, but I don't think the issue with crypto/defi/web3 is a lack of understanding of distributed systems or cryptography. I'd say they're doing alright in the purely technical aspects, although I'm nowhere near an expert.

Rather, I think the fault lies in their understanding of economic and societal concepts: money, debt, what it means to own something. I think that their vision of the future, where every human interaction is mediated by a pseudo-economy, is fundamentally flawed, and that trust is a societal issue which cannot be solved by technology alone.

You need a reasonably good understanding of the technology to know what it does, what it cannot do, and most importantly, where it's useless.

Even if you know very little about the business domain and all its social/societal/political aspects (and I perfectly agree, most of these problems don't have technical solutions) the space is filled with charlatans who don't even understand what a blockchain is.

You'll see plenty of people pushing blockchains where they literally want a centralized DB with a PKI, since they don't need (and don't want) a trustless permissionless system.

You also see blockchains pushed in situations where the weakest link is the human interface that inputs data. Yet the oracle problem gets swept under the rug.

Finally you see vaporware projects that go against 40+ years of research in distributed consensus.

I need to give credit to Bitcoin maximalists, some of them are very vocal about the non-sensical blockchain solutionism.

For what it counts, some crypto-grifters held a Bitcoin (ca. 2016, so before other crypto entered any form of public conversation if you weren't "too terminally online") presentation for an outside speaker thing at my uni. Out of general curiosity for the concept and a basic understanding of the technology, I went there.

It... frankly came across more like a cult induction. The speaker was straight up incoherent and seemed to advocate for some weird idea of bitcoin maximalism where in the future everything we did was about Bitcoin and how it's totally the future and babbled on about how we should all work at a crypto company when we graduated. I remember walking away more confused about the technology than when I entered and with a complete disinterest to work for that sort of company in the future, although some fellow students apparently really got into it, which is in retrospect kinda terrifying.

By comparison, the other speakers were much more interesting and useful, having a basic explanation about the design process of mobile development, showing the basics of how XSS works and talking about some of the challenges and technologies used when working with Big Data.

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