If you criticise crypto based on general software engineering experience, the cryptobros say: "You don't know what you're talking about!"

If you criticise crypto based on experience trying to actually use it, the cryptobros say: "You're astroturfing!"

Thus the only people allowed to discuss crypto are seemingly those with a financial interest in token prices going up. Funny how that works.

> Funny how that works.

This rhetorical device is tiring and divisive, please stop. I have no interest in crypto other than some coins I bought years ago that constitute a negligible portion of my portfolio and a passing interest in IPFS. I think the space is full of fraud and it would take a full-time enthusiast to find what's not. But there's no need to spread FUD like the person I responded to, nor is there any reason to say silly things like "funny how that works" and wink derisively at some cryptobro conspiracy. If crypto fails it will fail, and then you can laugh at it all day like everyone does to Theranos and WeWork. Until then stick to factual statements. The GP claims that nobody wants to work on crypto. I have no idea how your "funny how that works" sneer has anything to do with the original claim. Stop moving the goalposts to score internet points in an anti-crypto echo chamber.

That's a genuinely bizarre line of argument that I've only ever heard in crypto circles.

> Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by grassroots participants. It is a practice intended to give the statements or organizations credibility by withholding information about the source's financial connection.

* "grass roots" support is an 'authentic' community response on an issue

* AstroTurf® is an artificial playing surface used in some sports facilities (especially indoor ones), instead of a one made from real grass

So "astroturfing" is the creation of an 'artificial community response'.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180220171955/https://www.steph...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFlu61wJe2Y

He seems to have been interested in smart contracts but found the current implementations appalling. He wanted to use functional programming, particularly Haskell, to create something like a smart contract with better guarantees. But he is also careful to say that a smart contract doesn't imply a blockchain; he's talking more generally about code that executes over distributed databases.

This stuff is scrubbed from his website, and Adjoint doesn't even appear on his LinkedIn profile. But I can easily see why that might be the case if he's decided the whole field is rubbish and left the industry, or if his work is being misconstrued.

That said, having examined blockchains in depth gives him more credibility, not less. And it would be a rather bizarre business model to continually decry blockchains if he was actually working on one.

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EDIT: Found an interview where he distinguishes cryptocoins from other technologies sometimes labelled web3, like IPFS. https://www.coywolf.news/podcast/episode-12-stephen-diehl-in...

I think it's fair to say the guy is not an indiscriminate hater. On the other hand, I also personally was already convinced that crypto "currencies" are terrible but IPFS and decentralized organizations might be cool, so I guess I like him more now.

> This stuff is scrubbed from his website, and Adjoint doesn't even appear on his LinkedIn profile. But I can easily see why that might be the case if he's decided the whole field is rubbish and left the industry, or if his work is being misconstrued.

Gives his passionate publishing against Blockchains I'd prefer he not hide this aspect of his past and actually talk about it. I guess I didn't know that he had moved on from Adjoint so that does add more credibility to his beliefs. But removing it from his website, removing it from LI, and neglecting to talk about it in public can certainly cast some doubt. I'm sympathetic to your view as well though.

Anyway, I don't even know if he has moved on from Adjoint.

I agree there's something odd about this, but I've also seen how people who are vocal critics on the internet have to be less public about their associations. Not sure what to think about it.

he now seems to be a full-time anti-crypto propagandist. i'm not sure how he makes a living from that, but he seems to spend all day every day talking about it for at least the last 6 months and has gained a large following on twitter due to it. personally, i find it hard to trust anyone on either side of the debate who is this invested in their extreme position and unwilling to engage in any meaningful debate with anyone who critiques their positions.

here are some more links about adjoint for anyone interested in some more background.

http://internetofagreements.com/2017/12/18/stephen-diehl-adj...

https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/adjoint-distri...

https://web.archive.org/web/20190513032812/https://www.adjoi... "Adjoint empowers enterprises to achieve new levels of efficiency and control by delivering blockchain technology built specifically for the needs of the financial industry"

https://medium.com/b2b-buzz/adjoints-interconnections-dd619e...

http://web.archive.org/web/20210316021048/https://www.forbes...

https://www.finextra.com/pressarticle/79619/tech-mahindra-pa...

https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/adjoint-distri...

https://www.pymnts.com/news/b2b-payments/2019/treasury-manag...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFlu61wJe2Y

Maybe you have a better view, but I don't understand what you mean here: "My work (household name so we work with a lot of companies) has been seeing increased spend from crypto companies and so we've talked with a few folks from these companies and they've been hiring headcount like crazy."

Absolutely not true and this is very typical HN bubble-speak. Been helping with hiring engineers for a stealth crypto startup for the past 6 months, and getting some of the best applicants I've ever seen, most coming from FAANG. To add to this anecdote, one of my friends (FB product manager) was telling me ~Oct last year that a lot of engineers are leaving her team or churning for either TikTok or crypto startups.

But they just lost 37% on the "too good" money.

So where do you think these people are going next?

Following regulatory response, they have been downsizing it to a tiny speck of its former size.

Them losing folks to crypto companies is the most obvious result of the past five years, but it has more to do with their strategy struggles than the overall mindset of the engineering population.

Tokens _are_ worthless if no one wants to buy them, and pretending that is somehow different than startup equity is ignorant at best and downright predatory in the worst cases.

Crypto growth overall does not mean _your_ token is going to gain value anymore than the general growth of the economy means that startup equity is going to grow in value.

1 - token vesting contracts are often much quicker than startup grants, and public company RSUs. A few months to a year, compared to 4 years.

2 - tokens achieve liquidity much faster and more reliably, in comparison to startup companies of a similar age. this allows new organizations to compete in hiring against FAANGs, where employees also are receiving liquid things to sell.

3 - token grants can be alongside startup equity. so its an additional part of the compensation package. As such there is no compromise to rant about.

and just to acknowledge the “issue” you care about, correct a market may never occur or form for the tokens, no different than the equity, there you go, a tiny disclaimer on page 34. I agree that every employee should be objective about that, this is the same standard with every kind of organization aiming to compensate partially in non-cash, which puts us right back at square one: pick the one thats both interesting and compensates well.

Fundamentally not true. Unlike traditional markets, crypto exchanges work by leveraging AMM liquidity pools. Obviously, a token can go up/down based on supply and demand, but if there's liquidity you can literally always sell. Confusing early-stage startup equity is by far more predatory than giving someone some shitcoin with a vesting schedule. Any argument to the contrary is either disingenuous or misinformed.

With traditional equity offerings, you need to worry about: what class of stock did you get, what's the vesting preference, will you get diluted, what if you get fired, etc. I'm hardly a crypto bro, but imo startup equity is one of the biggest scams around that often takes advantage of young and inexperienced engineers that don't quite understand its financial underpinnings.

If no-one wants to buy a thing at any price, it is - by definition - illiquid. The notion that something for which there is no demand can be liquid is strange.

But it seems very much that it is true. Did you mean to make a different point?

If your point is that tokens without liquidity are worthless, then that's true (that's why initial decentralized exchange offerings always involve seeding liquidity pools, as mentioned). If your point is that tokens can get arbitrarily close to zero if everyone sells, that's also true.

But if you get a token that's being actively traded on exchanges and has healthy liquidity pools and a healthy market cap, that certainly is a better deal than some percentage "equity" an early-stage startup dangles in front of you.

It seems hard for firms below the Coinbase/Kraken/heavy hitter trading shop bar to pull serious resume hires out of SV, but quite a few Managing Director+ level hires moved over into crypto.

My sense is the NYC finance realize a core aspect of crypto - you might not think it's money, but enough people do, and there's an active market for it, so there is quite a bit of money to be made.

Traditional finance is well-trodden, every arbitrage opportunity has been tried decades ago. But crypto is full of doe-eyed innocents who think they're reinventing finance. Of course experienced traders want to take advantage of them. It must be more fun than ye olde eurodollar bonds, or whatever.

Well, sophisticated people also think it's money, but they entered '12-'17 and stopped talking about it. A more recent example though is Neuberger Berman's entrance.

The tragedy of the crypto moment is serious folks who didn't come from crypto made up their minds about it and did it a while ago, but articles like OP run interference against "everyone else" doing the same.

Some links:

https://medium.com/john-pfeffer/an-institutional-investors-t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wences_Casares > Casares was the entrepreneur to convince Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, and other tech veterans in Silicon Valley to invest in bitcoin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantera_Capital - scope out Morehead's background.

It's more like pending TXs which end up landing in a certain order that's possibly different once confirmed (which current banks do with checking/debit TXs and isn't a criminal offense).

Whoever spends some time building DeFi/L1 protocols is going to make a killing jumping over to Jump/Jane Street/HRT in a few years with that knowledge.

In reality, practically nobody cares and most employers are more than happy to hire experienced engineers who happened to work at some employers who did sketchy things.

But, if we're going to drill down into the ethics of crypto startups, I think they come out looking pretty good in comparison.

It's worth noting that the author of this post works at Hubspot which literally had an entire book written about how its workplace culture was highly discriminatory, particularly against older workers.("Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble ")

Engineers in glass houses....

The others are regularly criticised to varying degrees, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to work there for people somewhat conscious of their conscience. It comes down to the question “can you honestly expect to have an impact on the organisation, or is it more likely to hollow you out and make you into another one of their cynical libertarian defenders?”

This happens to be exactly the same misunderstanding as calling all criticism “cancel culture”.

Disclaimer: I worked at Uber in the past

I have multiple friends that have worked for major bitcoin/eth companies. You definitely know the names of these companies. My friends found themselves in exactly the situation I describe. Neither of them were "true believers" in the advocate sense. They just thought the technology was interesting, the team was good, etc.

But the problem is the loudest advocates in the crypto space are frankly, so insane, that even a vague signal you might be part of that group is a huge red flag for any business that is not all in on crypto. Hiring one of these people could be incredibly destructive to a team.

https://careers.chain.link/

Base: $300k Token-options: $450k