[stonks]

Why working in crypto exchanges would show poor judgment? There are still technical problems to solve.

I knew a principal engineer who heavily disliked blockchain because it uses a lot of energy for proof of work, but with proof of stake this should be better now.

[rsynnott]

I mean, why don't you want to hire Bernie Madoff's accountant? He was still solving accounting problems, and he'll be out of jail any day now.

[Tao3300]

> still technical problems

Namely:

- what schemes are still left for us to pull a lot of money into before they get recognized as scams

- how do we get out in time to leave someone else holding the bag

[trhr]

I spent about three months consulting for some crypto company as a distributed systems engineer.

They paid me to design an eventually consistent, self-healing data store with a cache layer / write ahead log, with peers determined by paxos consensus, transfers metered by finops and govered with kademlia, and a storage layer capable of byzantine fault tolerance, which we implemented via signature chains.

See, they had this crazy idea that they'd make a cryptocurrency that they could sell to western digital, who could offer hard drives that "filled themselves up" with other people's data when idle. WD would obv make a buck and maybe sell these drives for much cheaper than the component cost. I'm not exactly sure of the economics. I think the idea was to have half the drives be "receivers" and half be "senders" and actually sell the "senders" for way more than component cost, but provide trivial effort file backup.

I think they're still building it. I dunno if it'll be a scam or not. I had fun though.

[shakow]

I mean... morally speaking, how is it worse than working for Meta or Google?

[Tao3300]

Asking the important rhetorical questions o7

[shakow]

No, just not understanding why someone saying they work for Meta or Google is seen as A-OK on this forum, but if someone even mentions crypto, they raise such antagonism.

[Tao3300]

The difference is subtle: the FAANGs inflict ills whereas crypto itself is an ill. I guess some people split hairs over a distinction like that, but I hold them in similar regard.

[shakow]

I have to disagree: crypto let me send money to my acquaintances in less lucky in their birth place then me while enabling scams, Facebook lets my company advertise while manipulating people brains; I don't see why one is more intrinsically ill than the other.

[physicsguy]

It’s an industry full of grifters and scams?