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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But Filecoin IS a cryptocurrency. It's not merely "incidental".
Or change my mind and show me which of his projects is cryptocurrency-specific.
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.
The fact that "bro" is a derogatory term for you is also not great.
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"
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.
Prove is the technically correct word here, in the sense of mathematical proofs: the existence of an example proves that it's not impossible.
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.
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.
> 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.
...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.