A pile of Libra/Diem/Novi people have left. I think it's less fear of being hauled up in front of the Senate, and just being sick of spending their lives in development hell. Even the original instigator of Libra, Morgan Beller, left in late 2020.
The last attempt to get permission to do Diem was earlier this year, when they wanted to do a US dollar stablecoin with an actual bank (Silvergate) holding the backing. But a consumer stablecoin that's meant to serve as money in society was still too much to allow, particularly from Facebook. So Novi is now scouting around for other stablecoins to use in its wallet software.
This is assuming a significant number of users of Facebook-owned apps want to use Facebook for payments, which is unclear. Messenger Pay/Facebook Pay has existed since 2015 and still has negligible volume as a percentage of the FB userbase.
Or just believe that technology is inevitable, and you might as well be the one building it.
You might think that way, and consciousness about the greater effects of technology on the world are coming into focus, but there are still plenty of people who don't see it that way at all. Or they don't care so much and just want a paycheck.
It's harder to get young liberals in oil, finance and defense, yet those industries still have plenty of talented people working for them.
Well, possible, I guess. It could be exciting!
--> solve the problem
/
see a problem
\
--> exploit the problemGimme a break
Or also if the project has 10 engineers, and the first is the lead who knows everything and the second one is the one who knows deeply about some real important dependency it could suck - losing 20% of your engineers on a project is bad enough, but the two most important ones comprising that 20% could derail a project.
Crypto is more like a honeypot for the incompetent, ideologically delusional and/or pathologically greedy. (Which explains why certain FB executives are still running this doomed Libra/Diem/whatever project. They might do more harm somewhere else.)
All you really need to secure a blockchain is a number of parties who are not likely to collude. The original idea was huge numbers of miners using spare CPU time. There's a famous picture of the top 5 Bitcoin mine owners in China, who together had well over 51% of the hash power, all on the same stage, talking about what they, as a group, intended to do. That was not the plan.
The "smart contract" system was botched. Smart contracts should have been something like decision tables, which can be checked exhaustively. But no, they had to put in a bytecode interpreter, become Turing complete, and dig themselves into an expensively bug-ridden hole.
Incidentally, I suspect that the SEC's hammer is about to come down on the "metaverse" NFT people. Back in 2018, the SEC brought the hammer down on the ICO people, by prosecuting the worst of the worst and sending the rest of them letters saying "please explain to them why this isn't a security offering". Suddenly most of the ICOs disappeared.
What we're seeing now are schemes where people are selling NFTs which represent virtual land in virtual worlds not yet built. I've seen three of those in the last week. That's a security offering under the Howey test. If you sell an NFT for something that already exists, that's one thing. If you use NFT sales to fund the creation of something, you're selling shares in a common enterprise run by someone else. That's a security.
This metaverse stuff irks me because I'm into virtual world technology, and the make-money-fast crowd is giving metaverses a bad name by not actually building good virtual worlds. (Go visit Decentraland, which, by the way, only has 200-300 concurrent users. It makes Facebook Horizon look good.) Or, in too many case, building anything at all beyond the money-collection NFT system.