Comment by stakhanov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stakhanov | Hacker News Reader

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> He's an outlier in the industry.

...even more than that. He's an outlier in the industry and has chosen an industry with access to pyramid scheme money.

Neither the investment bubble surrounding FAANG, nor the job market bubble surrounding the talent pool that FAANG recruits from (namely SE talent that happens to be localized in the Bay Area) were sustainable.

Now that the market seems to finally be correcting away from that unsustainable local equilibrium, he's hopping right into the next one by becoming an open source crypto bro.

> "proves the thesis that it’s possible to be a professional maintainer earning rates competitive with the adjacent market for senior software engineers."

"Prove" is a strong word but "possible" weakens the statement.

"It's possible to earn 95th-percentile compensation." True, by definition, for 5% of all people. Nothing to see here. "There's more than one way of getting there." True. "Honest pay for honest work will get you there." Probably not. "Just seek out the bubbles and jump right in is a reproducible way of getting there." Probably not, you'd have to get the timing right, and that's mostly luck.

For anyone reading this, don't be misled by "open source crypto bro." into thinking the author is a web3 "crypto" developer, he is the maintainer of the go crypto library. Also what do you mean by 'Bro'?, it sounds demeaning. I have met filippo and he is far from being how you're insinuating him to be.

Yes, this guy is doing proper crypto, and the "pyramid scheme money" comment is uncalled for and incorrect.

Does it matter if "the guy is doing proper crypto" if he is getting paid by "pyramid scheme money"? Arguably it is worse since his presence is ostensibly legitimizing the "pyramid schemes". It feels like the techie version of celebrity endorsement

As are geologists who do “proper geology” research that aids the identification of underground oil wells. Yet it’s still relevant to point out where their funding comes from when it’s an oil company.

Pointing out, maybe. But calling OP an "open source crypto bro" and saying he earn "pyramid scheme money" is too much.

Effectively what should be pointed out is "this guy makes some extremely fundamental crypto libraries that are used by millions of projects out there, including cryptocurrencies". But that's hardly relevant.

I just use the term "crypto bro" broadly to refer to anyone who benefits, directly or indirectly, from cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and things like that. I do consciously choose a term that expresses the fact that I have a negative attitude towards those things as I believe that they're not "honest money".

Taking Google-money means taking money that's earned through surveillance capitalism and anticompetitive tactics deployed by a monopolist that erode our free markets. Taking crypto-money means taking money earned through "greater fool theory" of valuations of investable assets.

People, on the whole, are never all-good or all-bad. When I see somebody showing off their good sides, I instinctively start looking for the bad. When I see somebody owning up to their bad side, I instinctively start looking for the good.

The good in this person is that he does open source. But that doesn't make him an angel. The bad in this person is that he's a top earner in part because he takes money that causes bad things to happen in the economy. As to his personality, I simply have no information on that and have never met him.

> I just use the term "crypto bro" broadly to refer to anyone who benefits, directly or indirectly, from cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and things like that

Which he does not do. He develops cryptographic libraries (used to encrypt files, network connections and the like). Nothing to do with cryptocurrency at all, save some cryptocurrencies might use the library he writes, but most of the use will be for TLS connections, file encryption etc.

The article mentions "Filecoin", whatever that is.

It mentions it as one of the well-known outputs of a company he consults for. I am confident that he is not working on a cryptocurrency at all.

If your definition of "crypto bro" is so broad to include "receives money from any person or company that has ever incidentally done anything with cryptocurrency" you've basically painted the entire industry that way.

Just because it mentions "Filecoin, whatever that is" doesn't imply that he's working in cryptocurrency.

I use "crypto bro" to describe people who actively work/invest in cryptocurrency directly and/or evangelize it. This usage does not intersect with Filippo at all.

> any person or company that has ever incidentally done anything with cryptocurrency

But Filecoin IS a cryptocurrency. It's not merely "incidental".

Of course it is. Cryptography libraries can be used for lots of things. If one of his clients uses them for cryptocurrency, it is incidental.

Look again at the logos prominently displayed in the blog post. There's nothing incidental here and you don't get to make that kind of money otherwise...

That still doesn't make him a "crypto bro", any more than those companies using cloud providers makes the cloud providers cryptocurrency specific. They require stuff that's pretty universally applicable.

Or change my mind and show me which of his projects is cryptocurrency-specific.

>When I see somebody showing off their good sides, I instinctively start looking for the bad.

Fair enough, no reason to denounce him as "crypto bro", though, because you know full well what it insinuates.

Also:

>Google-money [...] surveillance capitalism

The email domain from your profile points to 180.136.102.34.bc.googleusercontent.com ...

Just saying, you know.

> I do consciously choose a term that expresses the fact that I have a negative attitude towards those things as I believe that they're not "honest money".

The fact that "bro" is a derogatory term for you is also not great.

> to refer to anyone who benefits, directly or indirectly, from cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and things like that

You don't?

There's a massive difference between "hey this signature scheme is safe, trust me I'm a cryptographer, all my colleagues agree" and "hey this signature scheme is safe because if anyone can break it they can steal over $1,000,000,000 USD anonymously"

> has chosen an industry with access to pyramid scheme money.

Seems you can confusing cryptography with cryptocurrency, this guys is a cryptographer, that's a proper expert level security guy, nothing to do with pyramid scheme money.

Cryptocurrency is one way of applying cryptography, and the article mentions "Filecoin", whatever that is.

Even aside from cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFTs and that kind of stuff, there's a lot to question when it comes to the ethics of the computer security industry. A lot of it is snake oil, like Firewalls that basically whitelist everything so as not to become annoying. A lot of it is a racket (e.g. you can't get insurance for your company if it doesn't have antivirus software). VPNs basically make money by helping people break the law by circumventing geoblocking. I could go on, but I won't.

Break the law? What are these countries that have instituted geoblocking into their laws?

I’m pretty sure that’s fully accurate. Filippo mentioned one of his backers is the Interchain Foundation [1], and several others of his backers are at the very least cryptocurrency/web3 adjacent. Note, the GP didn’t say that Filippo is working directly on cryptocurrency - but that the funding is likely (at least in part) coming from cryptocurrency profits.

1. https://interchain.io/

I read that comment as referring to the Bay Area startup bubble.

I myself don't refer to anything that isn't paying new customers with old customers money as a pyramid or Ponzi scheme, because I think that trivializes actual pyramid schemes.

But a lot of people do, apparently, and it's completely understandable that a self perpetuating scheme where startups losing money at their core business at a varying rate are constantly sold at higher and higher valuations to see who holds the last hand, is regarded with the same skepticism.

By "pyramid scheme" I meant crypto, not Bay-area startups.

> I myself don't refer to anything that isn't paying new customers with old customers money as a pyramid or Ponzi scheme

In Wikipedia's definition, that aspect doesn't seem to be strictly necessary [1]. They define it as "a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme".

In my mind it also plays a bit of a role whether you're doing that with retail investors vs. high-net-worth or institutional players. A retail investor generally can't invest in startups, but might invest in crypto if their neighbor recently bought some and then talked them into it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme

A person doesn't get any direct reward for convincing their neighbour to buy crypto, though. Compare to a multi-level marketing scheme where the person would directly sell to the neighbour.

> "Prove" is a strong word but "possible" weakens the statement.

Prove is the technically correct word here, in the sense of mathematical proofs: the existence of an example proves that it's not impossible.

Yes, it's absolutely mathematically correct, while being entirely uninteresting when taken in its strict mathematical meaning.

When a motivational speaker says something like "Billionaire X proves that it's possible to be a billionaire" that's mathematically correct, yet totally uninteresting. What people go there to hear about is methods for reproducibly becoming a billionaire or even just slightly increasing your odds of becoming a billionaire, and this article is just as lacking in that department as most motivational speeches.

Don't get me wrong. I think open source is a good thing. It seems like the author is working hard, doing good work, sharing it, and making a solid livelihood may be well-deserved for him. There's just nothing here that suggests a reproducible method.

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