zer01

This is by no means an exhaustive list, just a smattering of some of the bigger projects doing neat things.

The graph protocol - decentralized blockchain indexing feeding a network of graphQL servers hosting the data powering dapps https://thegraph.com/en/

Chainlink - decentralized on-chain oracles for basically any piece of data from the real world - https://chain.link/

MakerDAO - creator of the first “soft pegged” stablecoin, it is a series of smart contracts that allow people to lock up crypto as collateral and mint DAI, uses a number of neat and novel mechanisms to keep peg by adjusting interest rates and incentivizing economic behavior https://makerdao.com/en/

Compound - a decentralized lending and borrowing protocol with no centralized authority handling liquidations/collateral pricing/etc. https://compound.finance/

Uniswap - a decentralized exchange for swapping assets in a trustless way, has neat features like flash loans where you can borrow a large amount of money (millions of dollars) for the length of one transaction, as long as the money is returned with a fee. This allows anyone to do things like capture arbitrage opportunities, liquidate large positions, or whatever else can be done in one transaction. https://uniswap.org/faq

A lot of these are DAOs using smart contracts to propose and vote on binding proposals on chain and adjust parameters within the protocol or paying contributors and whatnot. You can see an example here https://compound.finance/governance

Beyond that there’s other blockchains focused on specific use cases like GameFi, bridges connecting together different blockchains and moving liquidity between them in a mostly seamless way, massive research attention being paid to zero knowledge proofs (which have a lot of potential implications in the real world), and multi-sig contracts for only doing things when a quorum of key holders come together and signal their intent.

This interview with Tarn Adams (one of the creators of dwarf fortress) is amazing and gives a good idea of the depth and pace of development.

It’s pretty bonkers TBH, I’d love to understand the abstractions and data models involved with software engineering this ambitious.

https://youtu.be/VAhHkJQ3KgY

The thing I never understand about this argument is that there’s a much higher likelihood of significant injury or death (getting shot) robbing the houses with guns, no?

Guns may be “easy to liquidate” (not sure if that’s actually the case) but surely selling Xboxes and MacBooks on eBay is just as profitable?

This I think is where a lot of the "leave your politics at home" falls apart. People's identities are basically a collection of the things they believe in and advocate for.

People work much better when they're happy and can be themselves with like-minded individuals. Companies like Google realized this in the 90s and ensured that they proactively have what they need to be happy (feeding employees, paying for healthcare premiums, etc) to great success. You see this continue with things like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31871581 IMO.

It's really easy to say that you as a business care about gay rights in order to have gay employees come work for you, but if you then contribute political donations to a politician who sees gay people as an abomination you can't seriously be surprise when people go "hey what the fuck".

When the "activist" types push politics into workplaces they are not doing it so they can talk about what they feel. They are doing it so they can find the people who disagree and damage their careers.

This sounds like your position is that anyone who advocates for anything (esp. when it's directly impacting them, but unrelated to work) only has one singular goal of weeding out disagreement and getting rid of it, which I think is ridiculous.

Humans are social creatures and we largely shape our perspectives by iterating with new data and communication. People can be (and IMO largely are) advocates for things that are important to them, have opinions on things, and don't have a singular focus of destroying anyone with different viewpoints.

On the other side, all humans have their limits to cooperation. As you have social interactions with anyone your viewpoint of them change, and realistically if I find out something about a co-worker through discussion like they believe that the 2020 election was stolen because Trump told them so it does inevitably make me scrutinize this person harder. What if you found out that a co-worker thought black people were genetically inferior or that women don't deserve to vote? At that point it's hard to work with someone with such a fundamentally different view of the world.

Is it "cancel culture" to say "we don't want nazis to work here"?

I disagree, having migrated multiple family members away from shitty plastic laptops full of bloat ware and ads and shitty Android phones full of the same they are much more able to use their devices.

I also find as a dev that iPhones and MacBooks “just work” and let me get my stuff done, much much more so than a Linux desktop environment or windows laptop.

I guess we may be talking about different things though if you’re saying the apple ecosystem isn’t living up to its full potential, but IMO the rest of the phone/computer ecosystem is full of cheap shitty plastic crap with windows installs that OEMs have had free reign to install whatever they want on (and even without that, why tf when I install windows 10 do I get ads for “candy crush” on my start menu?!)

A “planned leak” with 0 demonstration of legitimacy is nothing more than creative writing on the internet.

When planned leaks like this occur for real (or black hats are trying to prove possession of data they shouldn’t have like credit card dumps) there’s almost always a small cut of the data that’s released to give legitimacy to the actor and the dump.

This looks much more like someone trying to wateringhole attack people or extort crypto influencers/funds.

I absolutely love speed runs and think they’re a great expression of the hacker mentality.

To take a subtle bug in something like a physics engine and bend it to your will to eek out another 5s save off the world record is absolutely fascinating.

Not to mention things like TASBot which always makes a great GDQ watch https://youtu.be/7CgXvIuZR40 and got me interested in speed running in the first place!

Netflix is also down 66% YTD, Tesla down 41% while BTC is down 37% over the same span.

Clearly Tesla and Netflix were speculative assets without intrinsic value too by that logic.

Anecdotally I’ve personally seen a lot of “Bitcoin accepted here” signs while traveling around America. It’s not ubiquitous, but it is there. Hell, I bought a plane ticket with Bitcoin way back in 2014 for a family member to come see me.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of the “lightning network” but it uses some really clever cryptography which allows people to send/recv Bitcoin almost instantly, with finalized settlement done on-chain as a normal transaction when the payment channel closes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network

The other thing about payment finality is that thanks to blockchains with smart contracts (so not really on Bitcoin) things like escrow become pretty simple to conduct. You can write programs to enforce exactly how an exchange should work (“only release payment after proof has been posted to the chain”), and both parties can have confidence that no one is getting taken advantage of because they’ve agreed to immutable rules beforehand - to me that’s a super powerful primitive to build neat stuff with.

The theory generally goes that what convinces people to use the USD is that it’s backed by the full faith (and more importantly, full military force) of the US government. The Breton Woods Agreement and after getting off the gold standard the “petro-dollar” solidified the USD as the reserve currency for nearly the past 100 years.

The flip side is that unfortunately the stability of the USD is in the hands of politicians and other stewards of the country, which is an immense power to wield, and highly susceptible to corruption and misaligned incentives.

The idea behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is that the code and protocol are simply open source computer code. China can’t arbitrarily decide that they have more bitcoins than they actually have, even if they dedicate an enormous amount of power and influence to try to do so. It provides a tool by which people can transfer value even with hostile adversaries. There’s also a fixed supply that will ever exist, and while deflationary money clearly has issues when it’s the only currency used, as a counterbalance to politically-driven inflationary money it seems like a useful hedge, even more so than gold (we have estimations for how much gold exists but we can’t ever say with certainty - but you can search literally the entire galaxy for more bitcoins and you won’t find them).

There’s a pretty clear logical contradiction in claiming definitively that no protocols are actually decentralized or work better than their centralized counterparts in crypto world while also signaling that you’re so unfamiliar with it that you barely know what a dApp is.

This is an interesting write up!

The only question I have is around your point on monorepos - every monorepo I’ve seen has been a discoverability nightmare with bespoke configurations and archaic incantations (and sometimes installing Java!) necessary to even figure out what plugs in to what.

How do you reason about a mono repo with new eyeballs? Do you get read in on things from an existing engineer? I struggle to understand how they’d make the job of auditing a software stack easier, except for maybe 3rd party dependency versions if they’re pulled in and shared.

I understand that contract law and notaries are a thing, but people’s signatures are easily forged and a huge amount of the legal system is currently dedicated to resolving conflicts with this. On the flip side building a smart contract to divvy up control of an administrative function or control of funds in a bank account between a threshold of people is a completely different thing that and doesn’t involve scribbles on paper whose only recourse for forging them is the legal system and lengthy litigation. For one, what happens when you want to do business with someone internationally? Can you rely on the courts to back you up at that point? Low level international fraud is rarely prosecuted because it requires things like extradition. If I want to share control of a thing with a business partner in even somewhere like the UK the only recourse I have is the courts. OR I can use a multisig contract and balance the power in such a way where we either both consent to a change (and cryptographically attest to that consent) or it simply doesn’t happen.

Decentralized finance products like uniswap and compound are not the same as micro loans, and micro loans have massive issues with trust, fraud, and solvency. Being able to swap or lend assets in a completely trustless way is something new, and enables new and novel technology like flash loans to exist (which make for more efficient markets). Plus I can go read the actual holdings of these protocols and build whatever machinery I want to respond to changes. Both protocols have a governance process with a timelock so no changes are made without the market having time to react, which overcomes a lot of the risk of malicious proposals (if I somehow pass a proposal that says “pay me all the money in the contract” then everyone will pull their money from the platform before it executes).

As for MPC I’m taking more about cryptographic MPC than something like SETI. A HUGE problem with managing cryptographic keys, be they root dns keys (13 of which control essentially the entire internet) or keys for SSL certificates is that they must exist somewhere in memory to be used. If they’re in memory they can be stolen and no one can actually tell if they’ve been stolen or not until it’s too late. Right now we have ok solutions to some of this through HSMs but then how do you also do backups properly? The MPC research I’m talking about specifically offsets these risks by never having the key exist in one place, and instead it being similar to a multisig where participants come together to create this material. An added benefit depending on how you set this up is that it only requires 1 party to be honest for the whole system to remain sound. ZCash did their entire setup for their protocol this way (https://z.cash/technology/paramgen/). Coinbase also just rolled out support for doing this at scale so that they can have users participate in these crypto protocols without having to manage their own keys (https://cointelegraph.com/news/coinbase-unveils-web3-mobile-...).

So yeah I can see how if you’re a person who has done 0 research into this things sound similar on the surface, but you’d probably also be in the camp of “we already have the post office, what’s the point of email” back in the 90s.

Right, people in the crypto space also feel like "If you don’t see it then you’re blind", which was the point I was trying to make.

What is the use case for crypto. Do you have a vision for it?

Short term, the crypto space is building neat things like multi-sig contracts, decentralized finance products (with unique characteristics like flash loans), DAOs to govern things in a decentralized way via on-chain voting, and spurring innovation into real cryptographic research, including things like privacy-preserving crypto and multi-party computation. People are thinking very deeply about things like trust relationships and engineering systems to be trust-less.

Medium term, I see protocols like Compound eating the profits of the large banks and either forcing them to innovate (which would be great) or replacing them entirely. Why does my savings account yield 0.01% when they lend out my very same dollars at 5% in the form of car loans/mortgages? I'm not discounting FDIC insurance or the federal reserve, but things have tipped too far into the banker's favor IMO. Same deal with the traditional markets, there's a lot of fees and friction unless you're a big boy that locks a lot of retail out of the game. Private capital markets are in for a wake up as well - VCs hold a crazy amount of power and potential upside exposure because they're just the only ones who can get in on deals early (think early Google investors) - if that was more access-able we might be able to break the VC hegemony which loves throwing good money after bad and propping up terrible companies.

Long term, I see it as a series of tools and protocols that can establish a more "global-native" economy. Our world is getting more global, not less. A core foundation of immutable software feels like a more reasonable base layer to build on than trusting politicians and a gordian knot of deals. Someone from North Korea can build a smart contract and I don't need to trust them that it does what they say it does, because I can verify it for myself. Also economically, having a store of value that is also impossible to counterfeit is hugely useful, so people can't paint lead yellow and call it gold - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-gold-kingold-jewelr....

Nice blog, I'll preface this response with the fact that I'm not an economist, but I am an engineer and a technologist at my core. I also work in security so that's usually a lens I use to look at these things.

Also, sorry for the wall of text, but I'm legitimately interested in engaging with you on this topic (obv).

On Terra/Luna - there were a ton of people who did 0 due diligence on it, saw a money printer, and didn't possess the capacity to understand that the economics of it were unsound. On the flipside, I know of a good number of people who predicted that it'd destroy itself on the first bear market cycle. Retail loses here because they believe the hype train, and that's not a good outcome.

MIM (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/magic-internet-money/) is another stablecoin that's over-collateralized (first pioneered by MakerDAO with SAI/DAI), but has people similarly nervous, not because of its economic design (which they lifted from MakerDAO's SAI/DAI) but because of the stewards of the protocol - https://rekt.news/sifu-scandal/. Similarly the same people who saw Terra on a crash course have sent out warnings about MIM, and in general it has stalled in terms of its market penetration, which is the market working IMO.

DAI is the most popular algo stablecoin, and I believe it to be sound because of a smart contract based liquidation process that ensures that any DAI generated are over-collateralized with other assets, even if the underlying price of the collateral falls rapidly (there are economic incentives for people to liquidate others when this happens). I disagree with them using multiple baskets of crypto (DAI's collateralization is largely backed now-a-days with USDC, another stablecoin) vs the initial model where it was backed solely by ETH though, since I think it compounds risk in the system.

In many ways cryptocurrency projects are recreating many of the (failed) experiments in traditional economic history.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. People are taking risks and trying to overcome old problems with new technology and sometimes failing as a result. It doesn't to me mean that those risks shouldn't be taken, and I'm extremely glad that the UST/Luna explosion was isolated basically entirely to the crypto markets since I see this all as expieremental.

That said, I think that there are other tools/protocols/etc that are being built that are not purely economic in nature - things like multisigs are hugely useful for taking coordinated action in a trustless way, they just haven't been productized properly yet.

However there are some fundamentals that technologists forget when thinking about cryptocurrency projects. One of them is that the total value of a system remains unchanged unless there is actual utility provided by a new product or service.

Value creation is something that's always hard to gauge, and is what leads to speculation I think.

Take Uniswap for example - it's by far the largest decentralized exchange (DEX) that exists. It recently surpassed $1T worth of value transacted, and even had stretches in the past couple years where it overtook the trading volume of Coinbase (binance of course shadowing both of them - https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/decentralized-finance/de...). Is that value creation? I'd say providing a service to more easily swap pairs of assets with a very small finality window IS valuable.

Additionally, Uniswap (and some other protocols) have this notion of a "flash loan" or "flash swap" that, as far as I understand, are unique to on-chain crypto. The TL;DR is that this mechanism allows someone to borrow essentially infinite money as long as they repay it in the same transaction (with a fee). This leads to a situation where you don't need deep pockets to capture the value from an arbitrage opportunities - you can write an arbitrage contract that will either guarantee you a profit through a complicated chain of arbitrage, or it'll simply revert. To me that's a pretty unique primitive to build a more efficient market.

Another example I'll point to is Helium (https://www.helium.com/), which aims to build a global network of wifi hotspots, but incentivized (by crypto) based on the activity on your hotspot. Fon tried to do this in the early 2010s and couldn't find traction (because why would I share my internet with others for free?). Xfinity took a stab at this recently because they have a near-monopoly on people's internet connections (with no upside to the end user whose internet is being shared). To me, helium is creating value here, and the model is preferable to any alternatives.

That's not to say that I'm blind to the fact that there are a ton of ponzis and pump and dump schemes going on in the crypto space, but my point is that there is real value creation happening as well, it's just being drowned out by the other nonsense right now. The reason crypto keeps coming back is because bear markets shake out these crappy schemes and what's left is the projects and builders who are actually creating value and plan risk accordingly.

The second reason there is a considerable amount of misconceptions about cryptocurrencies is the issue of echo chambers

I agree 100% with this, but it's also not localized to just crypto. Go look at /r/superstonk or /r/wallstreetbets on reddit and you'll see similar things. We have the same problem with our politics too, just across different mediums. All of these have bad impacts on individuals and as society as a whole, and is IMO one of the greatest threats to global peace that exists. The internet was supposed to unify us, not divide us.

However misconceptions do not emerge purely from lack of access to differing ideas or opinions. Instead they originate when individuals are unable to recognize the limits of their own comprehension.

Again, 100% agree. This is also a problem pervasive in a wide band of things from politics to (as you pointed out) vaccine hesitancy. One thing I've grown to learn is that it's easy for me with my skillset to say "go do some research, idiot", but a good chunk of the population literally does not possess the skills to do so.

If you google "Is the COVID vaccine harmful" vs "Covid vaccine dangerous", you get likely different results, but most people don't understand that. Even if you do get to the right data it's usually nuanced and long/hard to comprehend so people's attention span falters and they look for a youtube video to explain it to them in 2 mins. Again, a problem that absolutely exists, but I don't think is unique to the crypto space.

As for your brainteaser: > A cryptocurrency stablecoin is introduced whereby holders must light a cash dollar bill on fire in order to “earn” one unit of crypto. The issuer reasons that for this reason, each unit is worth $1. Under what circumstances can this reasoning hold sustainably true? Is it possible for this peg to hold indefinitely?

This skips over the idea of redeem-ability entirely I think, which is a necessary part of a stablecoin. By destroying a dollar you're not creating something new since it's a one-way track. I can't redeem my crypto for the original dollar because it doesn't exist anymore.

If I instead "lock" that dollar in a smart contract to generate $0.50 of crypto, I can "unlock" that dollar by repaying the underlying debt. Likewise, I can take USDC send it to Centre on-chain to have them wire me money since USDC is just a tokenized representation of a dollar in a bank account.

Anyway, you seem like a smart person so let me know if you ever want to chat about crypto and economics in a more direct way. I think we could have some interesting discussions! :)

I can't see anything useful from crypto other than laundering the proceeds of criminal activities.

I think it's a pretty arrogant stance to say that just because you don't see the value in a thing that value doesn't exist. I don't see the value in Tiktok/Facebook/Snapchat, but others clearly do. Maybe it just wasn't built for me.

My general thesis on the crypto industry is that it's a fertile space, and provides new tools to people who want to build things. Is the next Google going to shake out of it with 100% certainty? Of course not, no-one knows the future.

On the flipside though, fertile spaces with new tools are exactly the conditions that gave rise to orgs like Facebook/Google/Netflix/etc, which changed the world in a number of ways.

If we're in the 90's and I'm pointing to this newfangled "HTTP 1.0 Protocol" RFC and trying to describe to you web browsers, Netflix, etc, I'm pretty sure most people will look at that as a pipe dream that will never see reality in their lifetimes. It also took many many websites and iterations to get to the Netflix we have today (Netflix being a proxy for "streaming services" for video content).

Same deal with putting credit cards on the internet for faster payments and describing Amazon or Ebay. Does e-commerce have obvious credit card fraud and criminal activity on it? Absolutely, if anything it's grown as a parasite in lockstep with the success of e-commerce.

Does this mean e-commerce is a bad idea in general? My position is no, new technology just presents new challenges with the benefits they also bring.

Social media is the humanity hurdle du jour in a lot of ways, but does that mean we should get rid of it wholesale?

Of course, happy to help!

The unfortunate reality is these scams are designed to be believable, and without there being similar sophistication on the part of Google to fight them they’ll remain effective :-/.

It’s definitely an issue though - the ability to transact near instantly in an immutable way cuts both ways, and adds jet fuel to an already thriving phishing and hacking economy. So I think crypto still has a while to go before it’s safe enough for normal people. Or maybe the space just becomes a layer between other layers and is more for finalizes settlement between institutions. Only time will tell :)

Proper treasury management for raised funds is something that needs done by everyone regardless of the business they’re in.

In the non crypto world orgs usually hold short term t-bills or other cash equivalents to help offset inflation. In the crypto space I see a lot of teams holding stablecoins, which is similar. Some hold their entire allocation in something super volatile which is a bad idea in the same way it’s a bad idea to take VC money and buy Tesla stock with it or gamble on GME options.

IMO treasury management is just another risk to manage as part of a business. If not managed properly you go out of business and if it’s because you were dumb with VC money by betting it all on Bitcoin then you likely won’t get more VC money again.

Yeah there’s a lot of examples now a days unfortunately.

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/07/10/crypto-giveaway-...

I work in the security/user trust space and it was amazing how it went from 1-2 scams like this and me going “huh that’s new and weirdly effective” to copycats springing up so often now that they seem to be a modus operandi for a lot of scam groups now.

Unfortunately they’re getting more sophisticated and usually coordinating with a large social media push (usually on Twitter via bots) and using hacked verified Twitter account and hacked YouTube channels with lots of followers to signal boost their scam.

Putting myself in Google’s shoes this is a hard game of cat & mouse, but they are also uniquely in the position to do something about it, and I’m positive their massive org can fight this better than they are today. Devils advocate being that they are making tweaks to things to stomp out this behavior and it’s just subtle enough that overall things are trending downwards and I just have selection bias since I’m looking for these scams.

Replace your arguments for crypto with arguments for the internet, and zoom back to the mid 90s.

There were a ton of shady internet companies capitalizing on this sort of hype and swindling people out of their hard earned money. Beanie babies were also huge.

Do you know what else was happening? The IETF was finding its feet as an org, RFCs were being written and iterated on, the building blocks of the modern internet were being built behind the scenes, and companies like Amazon were realizing that their value was not selling books but building a massive logistic network that could compete with brick and mortar stores. Porn companies (widely seen as morally reprehensible/unsightly) were also figuring out video streaming and PayPal was figuring out how to deal with online payments.

Yet, if you read the news and weren’t building in the space, you’d probably come to the same conclusions as you are today - the internet is a fad that will die out soon because there’s nothing of substance to it and it’s all just greater fool hype.

Zooming back to today - I’d implore you to go look at the research being done right now in the cryptography space - things like zero knowledge proofs, multi party computation, and threshold signature schemes are becoming more viable as building blocks every day. Same with a shift in mentality from centralized trust to decentralized control enabled by some of these cryptographic primitives.

Is every crypto project going to be the next Google? Of course not, but the entire point of putting VC money into the space is to push the space forward as a whole (along with spurring research), eventually leading to the next Amazon/Google/Facebook/etc. and pushing humanity forward in some direction.

New tools mean fertile ground for innovation, and VCs are interested in finding and pumping money into fertile ground since they usually have massively outsized returns.

Are they always right? Nope, but Marc Andreessen was around in the 90s, built one of the first web browsers, and co founded Netscape. So if nothing else he’s seen what unrealized fertile ground looks like, and a $4.5B fund signals that he sees it again in the space. Of course a more cynical view is that he purely sees the ability to enrich himself and his fund via pump and dump schemes without caring how it’s done but that’s something that only time will tell I suppose.

You know, I think if you take a time machine back to the early 90s you’d see similar sentiment about the internet and internet based companies.

“You want to put CREDIT CARDS on the INTERNET?!”

“You want to replace the POST OFFICE with the INTERNET?!”

“You want people to post details about their day on the INTERNET?!”

Those “snake oil” investments at the time eventually became Amazon, E-mail, and Facebook. The first ideas funded aren’t always the final execution of it (Facebook was not the first social media platform) but the idea is that VC funding spurs innovation and people taking risks with new ideas, which pushes the entire space forward.

People who see the entire crypto space as a “scam” are (in my experience) unaware of the real cryptographic research currently being done. Threshold based signatures, multi party computation, zero knowledge proofs, etc are new tools and primaries to build a better internet and give us better, concretely provable, tools to shape society.

Are there scams in the space? Yep, and I don’t like them just as much as you don’t since they delegitimize the real work being done. But I also see the future Googles, Amazons, and Facebooks of the world emerging from this unique space to do some truly amazing things despite those scammers in the same way that those companies rose from the early internet cesspool of scams and ads.

What you’re describing is a popular scam where a scammer rebroadcasts a previously run live stream with famous people and instructions to send crypto to an address for a “giveaway”. Since the livestreams are about crypto, people tune in and see a banner saying “send crypto here for a chance to win more crypto”, see a conversation that seems live with people they know, and fall for the scam.

These people you mentioned are not actually doing a giveaway, and YouTube is completely asleep at the wheel for combating these sorts of scams (they’ve been around for a couple years now, and automated detection is a harder engineering problem than scraping tweets).

The problem is that they’ve very lucrative for scammers since the scam is confusing enough for people that they think they’re credible, doubly so when they use hacked channels with changed names but have hundreds of thousands of followers to do the broadcast.

IMO YouTube absolutely needs to step up their game here - I’ve fought this sort of fraud at larger orgs and Twitter and Facebook both have pipelines established for security teams to escalate these things, meanwhile YouTube takes a report, let’s the scam run to its entirety, then picks up the pieces after the damage has already been done.

I echo this, I come from a highly technical background (security) and the 1,000 hours thing is true - I think most people can do most things that have a large group of humans do them if they’re able to find a way to make the time investment and willing to fail a lot as part of the journey.

I’ve built a lot of shitty frontends and done lots of bad design work, but now I like to think while I’m no color theorist or UX expert that I can build products that are intuitive and look good.

A side effect of this is also that it’s seeped into the rest of my life and I now unfortunately spot design faux pas everywhere and laughing about bad font kerning (or “keming” - https://www.reddit.com/r/keming) usually gets me a sideways look from my friends and family lol.

I highly recommend the solo founder + consulting path. Look around you and find a problen you want to solve, and try to solve it well. Maximize for being able to spend time on that thing. Do consulting work when you need money or want to change things up a bit. Eventually along the journey you’ll find other bright and motivated people who you will want to work with (as friends first), and possibly form a team of cofounders to build stuff together. I was in a similar spot about 5 years ago and not only has this path given me numerous ways to hone my skills across a broad spectrum of disciplines and stacks (not to mention dealing with very real “business shit”), but you meet wonderful people as part of this, gain a “see it with your own eyes” perspective of how dysfunctional most orgs actually are, and you forge a lot of good contacts and in-roads who can potentially be future customers of a product you build. Selling things is so much easier if you have people championing you internally, and people will happily champion you if you prove your competence and truly solve their problems. You also get real agency with this path - if you’re doing consulting work to pay your bills but maximizing for your free time to build products, you can also just…not build products for a bit. I’ve learned many skills, do personal research projects, and get to spend more time with people I love as a result. Obviously I’m incredibly privileged to be in this position but I truly believe if you’re competent and maybe a bit clever the opportunity is still there and very much alive. The best part is that if you no longer find it palatable, it serves as the best resume fodder you can possibly have - just go back to the “normal” working world and kick off the cycle again later using what you learn on someone else’s time (while also being an excellent internal contributor because they may also be your customer some day).

Do you understand how a spark plug works or how a hardware interrupt works within the Linux kernel?

I don’t, but people who have specialized in those specific disciplines and spent their time thinking about how these things work have lead to usable cars and usable/better operating systems as a result. USB is a spec that I don’t care how it works, just that it does.

I think crypto concepts like BFT, MEV, consensus, etc are advanced concepts for specialists in the crypto space who are building these same sorts of layers of abstraction that people will generally be using in the future. I don’t need to know how a spark plug works to drive my car, and the average person doesn’t need to understand how a physical device triggers hardware interrupts in the Linux kernel to use a keyboard.

People also don’t need to understand DNS or BGP to use the internet, because some clever folks built RFCs and open protocols that were adopted and bundled together to create web browsers, routers, and the general internet. Things were also rough around the edges in the early days there too, but have now evolved to be a critical part of today’s world. Traditional mail is still a thing but the obvious winds are blowing more and more to use e-mail for things, not because it’s a fad or has a lot of hype, but because it’s demonstrably better.

People here like to throw shade on crypto but there are already useful things (like multisig smart contracts) that are not only unique to crypto and useful today, but imply that there are other new and useful building blocks that need to be realized and developed to unlock more interesting and complex use cases (you can’t have Netflix or e-commerce without DNS and BGP for example, even if the vast majority of users have no idea how it works).

People excited about the space (disclaimer: I am excited about the space) see the possibilities based on the building blocks that exist today, not to mention the very real spike in practical cryptographic research that’s being done (zero knowledge proofs as a field of study has been massively accelerated by the cryptocurrency space). People also struggled to see secure real time video calls or online banking as a result of the DNS protocol being developed or the RSA algorithm being created, but some did see the implications and got very excited about that future.

The apps that power this sort of tracking are private entities which I’m sure check very low bar compliance checkboxes but have very little practical security or privacy engineering behind them.

They are absolutely abused by black hat resellers of this access to a broader audience for profit, and I would bet a large sum of money that there is more than a few groups who have infiltrated these companies simply to retain the ability to query this data for their own (nefarious) means like kidnapping/ransom/blackmail.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/tracking-firm-locationsm...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/gykgv9/securus-phone-trackin...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-acces...

Sure, I generally think of these projects as experiments to try to make this “store something permanently” vision happen in reality. Just because the vision has hurdles to overcome doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. Arguably GitHub’s Arctic Code Vault aimed to do the same thing in a different way https://archiveprogram.github.com/. I agree that the tail end support of bandwidth and storage costs for X years are obstacles for this vision but blockchains in their current form already incentivize keeping this data around and hosting the data as part of normal network operations. These projects are just trying to separate out the storage layer from the computation layer (which may be a folly, or may prove viable). The point is that there’s groups of people trying to apply these new tools in novel ways to try to give humanity better tools in some capacity, and I think that’s a fine use of resources and effort.

Have you heard of the uncensorable library project? https://www.uncensoredlibrary.com/en it aims to make some data permanent and available even in the face of Chinese censorship. Is it a panacea that’s going to scale for all data forever? Of course not, but it’s a novel approach and an interesting experiment (and look ma, no blockchain!).

It’s telling that you don’t know how wrong this is, but feel qualified to redesign a mature industry anyway. Banks are highly regulated and spend billions on security — that’s why the major breaches which are routine in the cryptocurrency world don’t have an analog in the real financial system.

I don’t want to get into some pissing match about my qualifications but I’ve seen the insides of a number of large financial institutions and their security first hand while working in the security industry. Your argument is that they’re regulated and have a large security spend which is sufficient, my counter argument is that they’re bloated and that large spend is largely security theater.

Doing things like spending money and installing Carbon Black on a server in some closet to check the “endpoint protection” box to auditors is not the same as a competent team sitting down and building an infrastructure with effective defense in depth principals.

Crypto is immutable which can be dangerous but that edge of it is also spurring novel research into things like hardware wallets, multi sig smart contracts, and multi party computation which are real tangible ways to alleviate some of these problems (and other, non-crypto space problems as well). You call it a bug, I call it a feature.

Ultimately crypto’s immutability is a form of global free market Darwinism playing out where protocols that are well designed (and again, really really give a shit about their security) are the ones that continue to exist. Shitty protocols built by incompetent people get hacked and die. Darwinism is not a “design flaw”, it’s what allowed us to transcend living in caves and build society. Has it all been smooth and easy? Of course not, but evolution rarely is. E-commerce had its own rocky start too.

They know that there would be significant penalties if they lose customer resources or grant access to your account improperly, but they don’t spend it on the same things.

Just because banks have reduced the tail end consequences of their ineptitude and crappy behavior doesn’t mean that it’s scalable globally and forever with no cost for those that use it or prop it up (U.S. banks largely rely on U.S. govt for this compensating control, as well as bailouts when they’re too big to fail), and I will point out that major financial institutions/networks have been getting hacked for decades at this point, but especially in the early days. There are tons of cases of theft, fraud, and abuse in the traditional banking sector (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015–2016_SWIFT_banking_hack). Fin firms tend to hire “crisis management” firms to spin media coverage and offset the negative PR when it happens though, which makes it ok in the public eye.

I’m not sure what banks you’re referring to here but every major bank has been doing anti consumer and illegal stuff for a long time, whether it’s Wells Fargo (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2020/02/24/wells-farg...) or JPMC (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/jpmorgan-chase-co-agrees-pay-...).

Just because they’ve offset the risks from this shitty behavior doesn’t suddenly make this behavior palatable or something we should accept IMO. The Equifax breach comes to mind as well, but don’t worry because they’re still around, and they were so nice as to offer everyone a year of identity protection (…offered through equifax) as compensation for their gross negligence. They definitely learned their lesson though right?

Right now smart contracts are very crappy computer programs, but people are still building amazing things with them (like DAOs or decentralized exchanges). It’s hard to say what people will be building 20 years from now or what they’ll look like in the same way that the idea of end to end encrypted video calls through Signal was not even something people could dream up in a practical sense without the groundwork invention/innovation of things like public key cryptography, and a minimal level of ubiquitous computing power in the form of cell phones to make it usable and practical.

Quantum computing is going through this too right now where we have the ability to compute with a handful of qbits, but the implications on a years time horizon are profound.

You do bring up a valid point in that it’s unclear exactly how the “legacy software” story fits in here. Migrations to new blockchains and the blockchains themselves upgrading without contention (Tezos comes to mind with this as a core feature) seem like the natural response to this problem. Not unlike anything else though it’ll be hard to predict until it slaps us in the face lol.