For the first time my anger over crypto moves into genuine concern.
Is an entire generation of young people experiencing a kind of "pokemonisation" of crypto well into early adulthood?
In other words, is a generation of 20-somethings wasting the better part of that decade on this tech, in these scams?
If so, this feels new (?). We're not talking about the chain-letter crazes of the 20s/30s, the housewife pyramid schemes of the 60/70s, the ponzi schemes of traditional finance.
We're talking about a "pyrimidization" of technical skill acquisition itself, wherein we dont teach classical mechanics -- that's too "physics2" -- but crypto-mechanics which solves no problems of the prior, and charges.
If this is happening the issues around crypto are perhaps much more severe than I, at least, initially thought. Yes, $100bn will be lost in a vareity of scams deposited, in the end, into the accounts of charlatans, children and gurus. BUT, meh, so it goes.
But a cultural take-over of the technical skill space by a crypto religion is far more series and needs addressing ASAP. Someone needs to explain to the developing generation that this isnt the future.
I hang out in spaces for people entering tech, and I see the crypto advocates and grifters creeping in and around these spaces. It's extremely successful. Lately, I'm even seeing crypto grifts specifically aimed at people entering tech from non-traditional backgrounds, weaponising the language and discourse of diversity and empowerment to trick them into not just buying into the grift, but code the grift for them.
For someone entering tech, everything they see is new and exciting and mystical and hard to understand. Without prior context, it's hard to see why overengineered crypto nonsense is different from all the other overengineered nonsense they're learning about at break-neck speed. For many of them, the only reason to enter tech to begin with is to earn a decent living. They lack the technical background to understand if what they're being paid to build is a grift or a legitimate business, and in the current market, it's increasingly in their best interest to not understand the difference.
I believe we lost when we collectively accepted "software is eating the world" as an inevitable positive maxim of our reality. In retrospect, it seems self-evident that the end stage of this ideology-slash-self-fulfilling-prophecy is a socially-legitimized software-based "value" chain that ingests raw wealth and produces absolutely nothing of value.
I wouldn't really worry about people with a college degree. At one point or another you remember you classes on distributed systems and you realize the entire space is bullshit. I agree we'll see bootcamp grads and other people from non-traditional backgrounds get burned but it also gives them opportunities that wouldn't exist otherwise, so I'm not sure it's a net negative overall.
The much bigger issue lies within politicians, the media and the general public who still believe we should let the scams happen for the sake of innovation, despite zero evidence thereof. Sadly I think we need a few more catastrophic events like FTX before people understand there's nothing to salvage.
I'm not so sure about this. I don't have a college degree, but I don't think the issue with crypto/defi/web3 is a lack of understanding of distributed systems or cryptography. I'd say they're doing alright in the purely technical aspects, although I'm nowhere near an expert.
Rather, I think the fault lies in their understanding of economic and societal concepts: money, debt, what it means to own something. I think that their vision of the future, where every human interaction is mediated by a pseudo-economy, is fundamentally flawed, and that trust is a societal issue which cannot be solved by technology alone.
You need a reasonably good understanding of the technology to know what it does, what it cannot do, and most importantly, where it's useless.
Even if you know very little about the business domain and all its social/societal/political aspects (and I perfectly agree, most of these problems don't have technical solutions) the space is filled with charlatans who don't even understand what a blockchain is.
You'll see plenty of people pushing blockchains where they literally want a centralized DB with a PKI, since they don't need (and don't want) a trustless permissionless system.
You also see blockchains pushed in situations where the weakest link is the human interface that inputs data. Yet the oracle problem gets swept under the rug.
Finally you see vaporware projects that go against 40+ years of research in distributed consensus.
I need to give credit to Bitcoin maximalists, some of them are very vocal about the non-sensical blockchain solutionism.
I studied CS and worked at 2 FAANGS before joining Coinbase in 2020 then a blockchain layer 1 a couple of months ago. Coinbase made me multiple 7 figures on IPO day and even with the crypto crash my current job has a cash salary of $350k and ~$200k in tokens.
Yes the tech is not usually innovative or groundbreaking but nothing I worked on in my web2 career or college was cutting edge either.
When looking for a new job this year I got a l6 offer at meta, senior at apple, staff cloudflare and a couple of startup offers. Not only was the base pay significantly less, the tech and companies were boring, most required in office attendance.
So I went with a blockchain company because they were chill, fully distributed, pay was high, and work interesting (we use a lot of cryptography, I have 2 phd’s on my team).
Am I a cryptobro believing this field is the future? No it could all go to zero. Has crypto allowed me to retire and make more money than nearly every colleague in university and FAANGS? Yes.
Pretty much. After watching the Sackler family escape with billions despite destroying America with opioids I’ve come to the conclusion that America is garbage and there is nothing important here except money. I’m securing my family and their future, nothing else.
But yeah crypto grifts sucks but my college roommate now works at Goldman Sachs, an old university TA works Exxon offshore drilling, a couple of classmates are African logistics specialists (acquire land at ANY cost including literally lying to poor peasants to sign over property) at Bain. Is there a ranking for better or worse?
All of capitalism and by extension society is rotten to the core.
This reminds me of the speech in The West Wing, where the president explains his reasoning for accepting the censure.
No one takes responsibility for anything anymore. We foster, we obfuscate, we rationalise. "Everybody does it." That's what we say. So we come to occupy a moral safe house where everyone's to blame so no one's guilty. I'm to blame. I was wrong.
If at the end of the day you can sleep well, more power to you! But things will continue to decline if everyone's only looking out for themselves.
I work in crypto (for a company that does market making) and I don't think I'm doing philanthropic work, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking it's any less ethical than working for MANGA.
> I wouldn't really worry about people with a college degree. At one point or another you remember you classes on distributed systems and you realize the entire space is bullshit.
The number of people in the space with degrees from major CS programs suggests that we shouldn’t be confident about that. Smart people can talk themselves into a lot when there’s the prospect of being rich, and the poor architectural fit of blockchains for most application led means there are plenty of distracting hard problems to work on rather than question the entire system.
This number is relatively small in my experience. I work on data intensive applications so I guess my department shows some selection bias, but I have yet to run into an intern or junior who thinks blockchains are a solution to anything worth solving.
Of course not, I've seen crackpots at every level, especially PhDs/postdocs/professors when their lab's funding depended on exploring bullshit ideas.
However I see a strong negative correlation between CS literacy and gullibility regarding blockchains and web3. HN is a good illustration of this, crypto-cultists are always surprised so many people on here aren't buying any of it.
For what it counts, some crypto-grifters held a Bitcoin (ca. 2016, so before other crypto entered any form of public conversation if you weren't "too terminally online") presentation for an outside speaker thing at my uni. Out of general curiosity for the concept and a basic understanding of the technology, I went there.
It... frankly came across more like a cult induction. The speaker was straight up incoherent and seemed to advocate for some weird idea of bitcoin maximalism where in the future everything we did was about Bitcoin and how it's totally the future and babbled on about how we should all work at a crypto company when we graduated. I remember walking away more confused about the technology than when I entered and with a complete disinterest to work for that sort of company in the future, although some fellow students apparently really got into it, which is in retrospect kinda terrifying.
By comparison, the other speakers were much more interesting and useful, having a basic explanation about the design process of mobile development, showing the basics of how XSS works and talking about some of the challenges and technologies used when working with Big Data.
Very, very, very few people work in the cryptography or even blockchain aspects of any element of web3.
The overwhelming majority of dev in the space looks exactly like web2. You whip up an Express/Lambda/whatever API backend that (at it's most "blockchain") uses a library like web3.js to talk to a blockchain node from a commercial service provider via HTTP or websockets. More likely than that you go further up the stack and use a really easy to consume library[0] from your API provider and don't even really get exposed to the nitty-gritty blockchain methods exposed by a lower level library like web3.js. Literally import lib, provide your API key, and do things like:
I find it fascinating to meet devs in the space who say they're a "blockchain developer" and after a tiny amount of conversation you realize there's no difference whatsoever between what they're doing and wiring up a backend + frontend solution to something like Square (or whatever).
So I agree with you completely - when these crypto companies or whatever start laying off left and right you can be certain the vast majority of the devs in the space can use what they've learned anywhere.
My company put me on a "web3" project recently, and as someone who has done some kind of web development, at least at the hobby level, since 1999, I can tell you that there's quite a bit of difference with web3. I think the web skills from a decade ago translate better to web-dev today than web-dev today translates to web3 development. With web3 you have to consider the different ways to get on-chain data, and the state is all on the blockchain. Testing is a nightmare and the tooling around development and deployment are still immature.
And that's before even getting to solidity or other languages you use for the "backend"
Sounds like you've been at this since I have (mid-late 90s as well)!
I somewhat agree with you on the state of tooling compared to web dev today but I'm not sure it matters or is terribly relevant to the point OP is making. I've been in this space one way or another for five years so prepare for a (somewhat anecdotal) "dump" that you may (hopefully) find useful for the new project that you've been put on. You mentioned Solidity so let's assume an EVM compatible chain and ecosystem.
At this point I'd call anything actually on chain the "back backend". Of course Solidity is the smart contract language but due to costs, speed, etc of the chains themselves the data is all over the place... That's how we've ended up with things like The Graph[0], Ceramic[1], etc. As you've likely already experienced interacting with the chains themselves in any capacity is remarkably creaky hence the plethora of somewhat ironically centralized API providers and solutions with many layers of insane amounts of code and backend infrastructure to make things actually work for anything beyond a toy (like the various Alchemy APIs I provided an example of). This is before you get into anything like IPFS, Filecoin, etc but once again the typical interaction with these is via heavily abstracted libraries and HTTP gateways that do their best to look like any other web2 service.
Smart contracts, by their nature, are rarely written and rarely deployed. If you look at some of the biggest "apps" in the space smart contracts represent a tiny fraction of the amount of dev work compared to the overall solution. Take OpenSea (as one example) they've deployed a smart contract twice in five years of operation AFAIK. If you look at their frontend and API docs it becomes clear really quickly they've done a lot more work in areas that at the risk of deploying "No true Scotsman" I would say at least 95% of the dev work in web3 is effectively web2.
Now that we're talking about smart contracts, the stakes are so high there is actually a fairly robust amount of tooling IMHO. Maybe not robust compared to the state of 30 years of web development but between OpenZeppelin[2], Hardhat[3], Truffle[4], etc there's a lot out there. From everything I've seen in the space over half my decade by the time you import a bunch of OpenZeppelin contracts there's almost always very little Solidity left to be written. As traditional cryptography devs have learned "writing your own crypto" is almost always a really bad idea.
If you were to look at LOC for anything in the web3 space my original point is backup up by the data. Metmask is used by 30 million people and it's all web dev (backed by an Ethereum JSON-RPC[5] interface hosted by MetaMask sponsor Infura by default)... The rest of any user facing application is your frontend pulling in ethers[6] and MAYBE a bog standard web2 service/microservice backend. Then you're off to the races. There is SQL, NoSQL, etc all over the place in web3.
From my personal experience and everything I've seen I'd venture to guess that maybe 1/50 devs in the space ever touches Solidity (likely much higher). Everyone else is doing what they've always done by reading the docs for whatever JS/TS libraries they're using. I've personally worked on many projects where web2 devs became "web3/blockchain devs" in an hour - to my original point of saying you're a "blockchain developer" because you're using ethers is really funny to me. My overall point being (and to assuage the concerns of OP) the vast majority of devs that start in web3 feel right at home in web2 and vice-versa.
I know exactly one dev who I would call a serious "blockchain developer". They came from a web dev background and they're all in on Cardano which meant picking up Haskell (which would send most web devs running for the hills). If a dev were to start with Cardano + Haskell I have no idea where they would end up if they left "blockchain development".
Thanks for the very in-depth reply. I've only been doing it for ~5 months now, so definitely consider myself a "junior" in the space.
What we've done is fork a popular defi protocol (think AAVE/Compound) that consists of >10 core contracts, plus additional for markets, and made a few changes. Then deployed a few custom contracts as well. I've written ~100-200 lines of solidity that are on mainnet now, the rest, as you say, are snapping together Openzeppelin legos.
We're not using The Graph for our frontend (yet) though I think we want to in the future.
Our current stack is Hardhat (with ethers) for both deployment and testing, and react + typescript + react-query on the frontend.
We're able to get contracts deployed on a hardhat node or goerli pretty quickly now, but, for example, if deploying to goerli, the 200-300 transactions for the deployment process take ~1 hour to send through, so it's really just where we deploy right before we release (in addition to testing on a fork of mainnet).
The tooling here is all kind of new though. Example: if I want to fork mainnet, test an upgrade, and then test frontend changes which use that forked net, as an account which I don't have the key for, I just.. can't right now. Hardhat lets you impersonate accounts which is amazing, but no frontend wallet lets you send unsigned transactions using an impersonated account (which effectively uses provider-managed signers).
The "best" way I found to do this is forking an open-source browser wallet extension, hacking it a bit, and hardcoding the account I want to send the unsigned transaction for, to the hardcoded local RPC endpoint, which requires an extension reload, and is still finicky.
Eventually I think the tooling will get there, but for right now it still seems fairly immature to me.
What big new field is there where you don't have to compete with people that have 10 times the experience than you?
Independently of what you think web3 might solve or doesn't solve, it's still just programming. Someone learning cryptography and coding will get a job in other places.
I'm not sure what you mean by "make a name". As a dev I never needed to make a name, I just acquired skills that were useful for businesses (or my own business) through building applications. How you compete with people with 10 times the experience than you is through a lower salary, as always.
I agree that "web3" skills are programming, and some of it is actually quite challenging and involves more computer science than your average web or mobile app, so I don't think web3 programmers are lost by any stretch of the imagination, even if that ecosystem collapses, they will be reabsorbed into the broader software industry.
I'm beginning to feel the same about mobile, though I think the rate of change in iOS is at least slower than the memes[0] about JS-framework-of-the-week.
I started iOS development with ObjC with manual reference counting; saw big and helpful changes with literal syntax and subscripting, ARC, and storyboards; I switched to Swift when it got OK; and now everyone seems to be going "storyboards and MVC are lame grandpa ways of doing things, let's use reactive asynchronous stuff everywhere!"
I'm starting to feel old, and it's not just the half dozen individual grey hairs.
That's a hopeful upside, that, say an 18 is learning data technology, programming etc. via crypto.
My concern is whether that's what they are learning; too early to tell, of course.
One thing I'm also thinking is that crypto functions like "wokeism" in the sense it seems a parallel right-wing version of the same kind of cultural reformation.
At the same time large retail biz profess their diversity credentials, their heads of research explain how crypto is on some timeline. At the same time a 20yo engages in activism for X, another engages in crypto for Y.
Do we need to "end the patriachy" or "put metriocracy on the blockchain" ?
My concern isnt just the skills issue, but also, everything bound up in the culture around it.
I think we're seeing Tech get to a level of cultural prestige that invites on-mass young-buyin, and mass cultish movements. No doubt finance experienced similar in the 80s.
But, I think, as finance people eventually learned to inculcate some level of cultural scepticism; tech seems it has yet to do so.
In otherwords, we're unprepared for this coming's generation having bought into a tech-culture landscape which is composed of scams.
But didn't Banksy say something similar about young artists being funneled into the for-profit corporate propaganda machine, trading their art skills and unique perspective (and expression of their interpretations) of the world at large, for a corporate paycheck?
“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”
Seems like every generation will need to battle with selling out, no matter the industry or era. But that being said, the web3 stuff feels pointedly scammier than even mobile/ social (which critics skewered even as it was burgeoning/ proliferating when it did, and people still rightfully criticize it today).
> For the first time my anger over crypto moves into genuine concern. Is an entire generation of young people experiencing a kind of "pokemonisation" of crypto well into early adulthood? In other words, is a generation of 20-somethings wasting the better part of that decade on this tech, in these scams?
I'm a middle aged developer who spent pandemic time in "web3" (ugh) dev discords and stuff.
There are scammers, sure, but mostly there are a lot of young people who are learning tech in an environment that feels fun and rebellious and honestly a little like the old internet in a way. There is a lot more happening than just people building magic ponzi boxes. It's hard to feel anything but positive about seeing people excited about learning JS or OCaml or Python or Processing.
That said, truly don't understand "web3" and this obsession with things being on a blockchain. It feels like people don't know their Internet history and also I don't understand why DWeb/indie web and web3/blockchain people are fighting since I think they'd be stronger together.
Personally, I think the Fediverse and IndieWeb are in a much stronger position. Key thing to watch: does Mastodon manage to ride the wave created by the Twitter collapse and become a socially relevant force? Even in some small communities?
I'm much more bullish on small communities talking to each other with open source software (Fediverse) than magical crypto schemes that require deep economic expertise to design properly (which nobody on the project ever has).
I do think Podcasting 2.0 is a neat idea. There's room in this world for micropayments. I just don't want it to be pervasive and I'm exhausted from the stream of scams.
I had an interesting discussion with a young "developer" studying in "cyber-security". The guy was clearly out of his depth, and had a little idea about Internet security themes. He was struggling about finding an internship. I told him the market is still hot for tech people and security in general. His answer? "It's hard for me because I'm a person of color". I was a bit shocked there. He was just a bit browner than me, and far from black.
"person of color" vs "white" isn't the same as colorism, it also includes other racial markers. Melania Trump is darks than many "black" "people of color".
What technology? What use? The piece starts with a relatively straightforward value play being cast as not web3 enough. What even does that mean? And we are not supposed to talk about it, just let it crash around us like a wave?
>But a cultural take-over of the technical skill space by a crypto religion is far more series and needs addressing ASAP.
The technology is blockchain, and the skills are writing/reading smart contracts, developing websites making use of Wallets, and everything else that anti-crypto folks keep screaming "IT'S USELESS, USE POSTGRES INSTEAD". If that is true, then the ecosystem will die on its own.
The fact that Web3 is being banged on ad-nauseam as a marketing buzzword, muddying the waters to the point that no one is sure what the hell Web3 even is, does not undermine the technological foundation, which is blockchain. Again, if blockchain IS useless then it will die off, but ... Bitcoin is still going strong a decade in, despite all the bullshit that surrounds it, and is likely impossible to kill off completely. That alone has merit, IMO. Of course, you are free to disagree.
You can talk about it, but actively advocating that "cultural take-over of the technical skill space" needs "addressing" is complete and utter insanity. Blind hatred. You people have become as religious as crypto folks, except in the opposite direction. I've seen people advocating about blacklisting people who worked in crypto/web3 as well.
You are completely losing it. I am honestly worried.
People criticize technology all the time on this forum. Is this pointless because useless technology would die on its own anyway? Maybe eventually, but only after wasting resources.
I think crypto is much more like pokemon than "the internet". Much more like "coin collectables" of the 80s, than financial derivatives.
It's an attempt to destabalise domestic and international economic and financial systems that if ever even got close to being useful, would immediately be shut down.
The moment I can walk into a random shop and buy a chocolate bar with cyrpto is the moment the whole system will collapse.
The tragic irony is that many of those teachers’ pension funds were the very ones making it lucrative for sociopaths to build crypto companies by blindly throwing money at them.
At this point, web3 is becoming strongly associated with high-profile scams, many of them likely criminal. It's also associated with people who won't stop talking about how the blockchain will make your teeth whiter, or something equally unlikely.
Blockchains are just decentralized Merkle trees. Merkle trees are a cool trick (look at git!). But the cost of decentralizing them, Bitcoin-style, has been massive carbon emissions. And the gain from decentralizing them? It's usually pretty tiny. I mean, I guess zero-trust decentralization makes it impossible to recover your coins if they're stolen or lost by an exchange, but that doesn't exactly seem like a huge advantage. /s
In most of the financial blockchain pitches I've heard, you could replace proof-of-work via a time-stamping service run by a trusted clearing house. Just have someone like DTC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_Company keep track of the HEAD of git repository, and you'd be 95% of the way there. They already handle 100s of trillions of dollars of transactions a year with much less risk and drama than the average crypto exchange.
I think it's worth separating the technology of cryptocurrencies from the culture surrounding it.
Blockchain technology was innovative and is interesting, but still early stage. I doubt that many of the early adopters of Bitcoin expected it to blow up in the way that it did, rather than just being a cyberpunk experiment that would potentially lead to some world-changing technology in the future. I would consider myself an early Bitcoin adopter, and all I ever really used it for was to buy pizza for like 10 BTC back when it was all a bit of an interesting joke. It certainly seemed like something that could change the world, but not in its current form.
When viewed in this light, issues like carbon emissions are more understandable. When you're prototyping some new idea, you probably aren't thinking about carbon emissions at that point. That's something that can be hopefully figured out later, like Ethereum are trying to do.
What turned Bitcoin/cryptocurrency from an experiment into the toxic hellscape it has become are cryptobros, scammers and gamblers looking to make a quick buck, helped along by investors and finance companies who are drawn to buzzwords and don't understand anything about technology.
Clearly we're entering a long crypto winter now, which I think is a good thing. However, I doubt the story is over quite yet.
> Blockchain technology was innovative and is interesting, but still early stage.
[1]
- Cryptographer David Chaum first proposed a blockchain-like protocol in his 1982 dissertation
- Further work on a cryptographically secured chain of blocks was described in 1991 by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta
- In 1992, Haber, Stornetta, and Dave Bayer incorporated Merkle trees into the design
- The first decentralized blockchain was conceptualized by a person (or group of people) known as Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008.
Even the most charitable interpretation makes blockchain 14 years old. In computer tech terms it's old, and there are still no discernible use cases for it. Because, as the article succinctly puts it: "technologies, processes, people, regulations, laws, industry, and the entire legal and societal foundation that underlie an organisation, no matter how imperfect, aren’t 'web2', and that they can’t just be converted to 'web3', whatever that meant."
> don't understand anything about technology.
Oh, they understand it very well. THey also understand that humans are gullible.
It's not particularly early in technology terms. It's very early in terms of society, finance and money, though.
It took us at least 3000 years to go from coins to fiat currency, and we still don't really know how it works. It took 50 years to go from physical money to mostly digital, and we're still not completely there. Contactless payments predated Bitcoin and they're still rolling out in the USA, despite being a very minor upgrade on the existing technology. Up until fairly recently, finance industries wouldn't even touch the cloud. I mean the USA only reached 50% internet penetration in 2000, and packet switching was invented all the way back in 1965, and was still considered a new technology by many in the mid 2000s.
Cryptocurrencies might completely fizzle out, or they might completely replace the modern finance industry. Personally, I think they'll die in their current form, but we'll take some of what we learnt to build new technologies. My view is that CBDCs have more potential than cryptocurrencies, but there's still a lot of cross-pollination going on between the two right now.
For what it's worth, I don't own any cryptocurrencies and haven't for years. Never touched NFTs and I'm still not really entirely sure what Web 3 is. I stopped paying much attention when the whole industry was overrun by bros and shysters. I just don't think it's wise to completely dismiss this branch of technology so readily. Certainly not in a global bear market when everyone is doubting everything and dumping their risky investments.
The history of financial market regulation is written in blood. It started out very much like the crypto grift space where anything goes, until governments wised up to the negative effects and decided to regulate.
Is an entire generation of young people experiencing a kind of "pokemonisation" of crypto well into early adulthood?
In other words, is a generation of 20-somethings wasting the better part of that decade on this tech, in these scams?
If so, this feels new (?). We're not talking about the chain-letter crazes of the 20s/30s, the housewife pyramid schemes of the 60/70s, the ponzi schemes of traditional finance.
We're talking about a "pyrimidization" of technical skill acquisition itself, wherein we dont teach classical mechanics -- that's too "physics2" -- but crypto-mechanics which solves no problems of the prior, and charges.
If this is happening the issues around crypto are perhaps much more severe than I, at least, initially thought. Yes, $100bn will be lost in a vareity of scams deposited, in the end, into the accounts of charlatans, children and gurus. BUT, meh, so it goes.
But a cultural take-over of the technical skill space by a crypto religion is far more series and needs addressing ASAP. Someone needs to explain to the developing generation that this isnt the future.