But the majority of people interested in crypto don’t care about the technology, they are in it to get rich. Articles talking about the new technologies underpinning crypto do exist and get submitted, it’s just that to a rough approximation nobody cares about the actual technology.
Look at the level of discussion bitcoin had when it wasn’t realistically exchangeable for USD. That’s the equivalent level of interest from a pure technology perspective.
All of the noise today (including this article) are about the societal implications of disrupting this or that or enabling some other business/grift that wasn’t possible before. The technology is almost irrelevant at this point.
There I disagree, my news feeds in other places are heavily populated by development discussion, and word travels fast in the crypto-sphere. So aside from noticing that HN consensus is distinctly not part of it, it would be hard for me to agree less or disagree more. But people are here, they just arent the active contributors and arent coordinated to elevate their posts and comments.
For example, I just had the realization that I could learn a new programming language to write smart contracts solely because I dont need to market myself to out-of-touch recruiters and hiring managers. Deploying stuff onchain is lucrative enough. This changes the entire incentive model of a software engineer, or even a founder’s new venture, as both would otherwise need to optimize for new and shiny web 2.0 frameworks just to attract talent or be attractive to the next company.
I’m not saying that you can’t get good RSS feeds, small communities, etc. I’m saying that any discussions about crypto are going to be completely dominated by the people that love/hate crypto fighting over the non-technical aspects.
This isn’t special to hackernews or crypto, it just happens with anything that becomes disruptive in a good and/or bad way to vocal segments of society.
The same thing happens if discussions were to come up about effective mask technology, better abortion methods, gun improvements, etc. The people actually interested and capable of discussing the technology are dwarfed by the people who have feelings they feel compelled to share.
That seems very interesting! But how does deploying stuff on-chain change the calculus? An unknown person with no Twitter following who's not a member of a Yacht Club/other NFT gang can deploy a contract, but getting people to want to use the contract seems to be a problem for a lone-wolf developer.
Or am I only seeing the tip of the iceberg for the ecosystem?
Getting people to use it is not as hard as you think, unless it’s an entirely new concept. Do more of what works and improves people’s experience, undercut fees from existing contracts. Or make a premium version for that audience segment.
AMMs
Farming
Bridges
Wrapping services
Zapping services (wrapping + amm lp + farming in one transaction)
Yield optimizers (slightly solving issue with LP farming and AMMs)
And if you create a token it advertises itself, bots watch for LPs on AMMs to interact and humans notice the interaction, but another area you can compete is based on how community minded the token is, versus obvious self enrichment
I intentionally chose not to make this a primer on all the acronyms
I also scan the blockchains for certain method signatures of previously popular, which appear when they are invoked. So I find copycat contracts this way, which helps me know about new projects and communities.
Either way to your original question: The time to market is extremely short, the funnel is nearly non-existent with crypto natives, and the overhead costs are lower if you can code - all compared to SaaS deployment or being employed by a SaaS service
"But the majority of people interested in TikTok don't care about the technology, they are on it to watch people dance and laugh."
The majority of people on the planet don't care about technology except what it can do for them. Having nuanced discussions about technology usually only interesting to a small subset of people. For many other technologies, HN is a place to have that discussion. But it hasn't been for crypto.
> Look at the level of discussion bitcoin had when it wasn’t realistically exchangeable for USD.
Bitcoin's first block was January 3, 2009. 10,000 bitcoin were famously exchanged for two Papa John's pizzas on May 22, 2010. The first bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, was launched July 18, 2010. So you're talking about a year and a half window since it was first conceived to have such discussion, less than 12% of the entire time bitcoin has been in existence.
And considering the name of the bitcoin paper is "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", there was probably some talk about it eventually being exchanged for USD right from the start.
> nobody cares about the actual technology
Yeah that's not true. On HN that may be more or less true (although I care about the tech and I'm on HN), but there's plenty of people that care about the tech and are discussing it in other channels.
It's crazy, I've had much deeper discussions about the tech with people who can't even program on channels on Discord than I've had on HN, ever, about this space. I'm still desperately trying to play catchup, they keep dropping articles and talking about things and concepts I haven't heard of before. And intelligently, too, not just "I like the web3 makes me money go fast moon please." like it seems everyone on HN assumes these people think.
There are people legitimately trying to do new and interesting (to me anyway) things with the space, and donating their time and energy and cash to try to build it and make it happen.
It doesn’t matter. My point is that was the only time the discussion was actually dominated by people interested in the technology. It’s a reference to a point in time and the tone of discussion around then. I was in security academia at the time and discussions were level-headed about bitcoin, hash cash, and other digital currencies.
> there was probably some talk about it eventually being exchanged for USD right from the start.
There was, but that wasn’t the technology talk that dominated the discussion. There is a reason it sat around for so long until the famous pizza purchase. It was about the technology at the start.
> Yeah that's not true. On HN that may be more or less true (although I care about the tech and I'm on HN), but there's plenty of people that care about the tech and are discussing it in other channels.
To a rough approximation, it’s about 0% of the people interested in crypto though. There are maybe a few thousand actual active crypto developers (and that’s being generous). The number of people who buy crypto to invest/gamble is now in the millions. The conversations are always going to be dominated by topics surrounding the latter because it’s so controversial.
The only way to get to technical discussions is to weed out the people who don’t like it, so you basically have to stay off any general technology forums (HN, chunks of Reddit, etc).
> And intelligently, too, not just "I like the web3 makes me money go fast moon please." like it seems everyone on HN assumes these people think.
That’s a strawman of crypto detractors. It doesn’t help you to model opposing arguments that way.
> There are people legitimately trying to do new and interesting (to me anyway) things with the space, and donating their time and energy and cash to try to build it and make it happen.
Sure, but pretending to invent an entire new generation of the internet (“web3”) is overly grandiose and the better discussions happen around specific technologies.
So too are the majority of investors in anything there to make money; you think they care about 'The Project' past its profits for shareholders? Developers who are only in it to make money is another thing, but even that group has nuance - some of them understand that the best way to make money long term is to build something valuable, and don't expect to get rich in one month.
As I wrote, I’m acutely aware of the signals for consensus formation, it is important for other people to know what kind of conversation is possible
I personally wouldn't know where to point you, and sadly its more likely you too will run into disillusioning use cases from your own exploration (or wind up in a cult to bolster an implementation that is going nowhere). For me, it's been more interesting to accept that no state of the these technologies is set in stone, that I can influence the future state, and that the monetary incentives to build and influence the future state are phenomenal. Better option than smugly exploiting myself at an adtech conglomerate, for less money.
There is room for more specific things to be discussed, like if you look at the frontpage right now, there is a thread about "Deserializing JSON fast" or "A comparison of Rust and Zig". There could just as easily be discussions about "Solidity vs Vyper" or a thread every time a new version of one of those languages used in Ethereum Virtual Machines is out. Or node technology and processing transactions faster. Things that can inspire, but instead we just get these broad think pieces from wannabe angel investors and some influential VCs. As this is what makes it, it shows that this isn't the community to expect a deeper discussion right now.