The danger in a space like this is throwing the baby out with the bath water.<p>- Yes, there are an insane amount of scams, and lots of dumb money flowing in<p>- Yes, many use cases of blockchains should really be databases<p>- Yes, many blockchain job posts are just PR initiatives for companies who want to differentiate themselves<p>That said, it's an early time to have a tremendous amount of impact.<p>Don't like "proof of work"? Go hack on various other implementations. Get angry at banks? Go figure out ways to remove custodial risk, so that we may not need as onerous financial regulations that stifle innovation. Angry about security in this space? Go find security holes and disclose them.<p>Even for fun side hacks, there's a huge app layer that could be built on your smart contract blockchain of choice.<p>I say this having worked at the World Bank, Gates Foundation, and a mobile payments startup in India: financial services could truly use innovation, and providing safe, secure, broad access can have huge impact, especially in countries with weak legal systems. Blockchains are a "shot on goal" of trying this, though they may also never live up to the hype.<p>I'm all for calling bullshit on hyped trends ( <a href="https://www.nemil.com/musings/shinyandnew.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nemil.com/musings/shinyandnew.html</a> ), but just because a space attracts snake oil salesmen, "get rich quick" schemers, and cargo culting programmers doesn't mean that there might not still be great opportunities to do good engineering and have huge impact.
> It seems like people already know that they want to use a blockchain even before they understand what the problem is, basically a solution in search of problems.<p>This is the story with basically any startup in a hot space. This could be just as easily about AI / Machine Learning.
I disagree, although the ecosystem is filled with scams, and evangelists have financial interests in promoting their believes, there are some promising advantages.<p>Also the energy requirements for PoW systems are cheap compared to its gains as pointed out by Nick Szabo:
"We need more socially scalable ways to securely count nodes, or to put it another way to with as much robustness against corruption as possible, assess contributions to securing the integrity of a blockchain. That is what proof-of-work and broadcast-replication are about: greatly sacrificing computational scalability in order to improve social scalability. That is Satoshi’s brilliant tradeoff. It is brilliant because humans are far more expensive than computers and that gap widens further each year. And it is brilliant because it allows one to seamlessly and securely work across human trust boundaries (e.g. national borders), in contrast to “call-the-cop” architectures like PayPal and Visa that continually depend on expensive, error-prone, and sometimes corruptible bureaucracies to function with a reasonable amount of integrity."
The space really is getting pretty crazy. I feel like my biggest fear these days is getting kidnapped by a van full of venture capitalists and forced to develop cryptocurrencies.
In the US, the financial system is about 10% of GDP. (The number depends on your definitions of financial system, US, GDP, and "is"). It also consumes vast amounts of resources ranging from gasoline to drive mortgage brokers to and from work, to the cost of mailing out free low-introductory rate credit cards.<p>It's a fair criticism of Bitcoin that it uses a lot of energy, but it's hard to predict whether it will ultimately use more or less than the existing system as a percentage of value created.
While turning down the job is just fine, here's what happened instead:<p>- Someone else with similar capabilities as OP's probably took the job.<p>- This person will make significantly more money than what OP will be making (as OP points out)<p>- This person will have learned way more about the implication of the technology, whether it actually is as bad as what mainstream media says or if those are all coming from ignorance.<p>Even if this whole Bitcoin thing comes crashing, accepting a job that's much higher paying, and lets you explore a new edge technology, all while being able to work remotely, all sound like a game you can't lose.<p>p.s.<p>All this narrative about how proof of work == global warming, and how bitcoin won't work because of such and such are mostly based on lack of deep knowledge.<p>Sure, they say "yeah i've read the whitepaper and I totally understand how it works", but that's not enough. I've been there and now that I know more about it I feel ashamed of blabbering my mouth to people about these things because to people who actually know things, these words immediately turn on red flag and they mentally mark you as "don't know what you're saying".<p>It's funny how most people who criticize bitcoin and blockchain for all these things actually haven't gone deep enough to have the expertise to say these things. They are basing their "opinions" on what someone else--who is most likely also less than enough informed--said.<p>If you really want to talk shit about Bitcoin, at least spend about a month, learning everything possible. Otherwise you'll be ashamed of yourself ever saying those things (just like I did) when maybe later on in your life you learn more about the technology.<p>[Edit] To those who are saying: "if you know so much, why don't you just show us what you've got? Prove to us that proof of work can work" or things like that, if it was that simple to explain in a single comment, would I say learn for one month? (Actually one month is not even enough. It took me a full 3 months of doing nothing but teaching myself to get even closer to understanding the landscape) Even if I did my best to explain to you here, I would fail to convince you because it not only involves technology but everything around the ecosystem. I'm not trying to be condescending. I'm saying do yourself a favor and teach yourself wth is going on so that you can make informed decisions about whether you do want to jump in or not. Don't believe what uninformed people are saying.
The crypto community is the organized religion of tech <a href="https://twitter.com/jakefuentes/status/955151552984920064" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jakefuentes/status/955151552984920064</a>
I don't necessarily disagree with the author here, but I would be genuinely curious if the job offer was for one of the "scammy cryptocurrency ICOs" or for one of the industry use case that seem to be destined to survive after the current round of scamminess passes.
I accepted an offer to join a top cryptocurrency project recently.
I worked for many companies in different industries as a software engineer in the past and this job
feels more meaningful than all of them.<p>Cryptocurrency is like banking, venture capital, social networking and religion all rolled into one.<p>Before, startups used to get traction by joining popular accelerators like YCombinator, from now on, startups will get traction by affiliating themselves with popular cryptocurrency projects. It's funding by the people, for the people; nobody is locked out, everyone can participate.
I liked his comment about trust, it's something that always bothered me with the very radical trust model of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It is not entirely clear why you have to go all the way and do away with _all_ trust, except for niche applications such as transactions for people in repressive regimes (which are necessary but do not require us to replace conventional currencies with cryptocoins). In normally stable countries and economies, trust works great and makes everything so much more efficient.<p>If you don't like single central banks or intransparent financial institutions - cool, good thing there are Byzantine consensus algorithms that don't require proof-of-work but simply some known identities (in blockchain lingo this would probably be permissioned blockchains). You can get much of the benefits and build an ecosystem around known, trustworthy actors and don't have to use awkward mechanisms like proof-of-work.
I just accepted a generous blockchain job offer with a fortune 500 company. But they are not interested in building a new blockchain implementation, but rather exploring smart contracts and their possible relevance to their business.
>> It seems like people already know that they want to use a blockchain even before they understand what the problem is.<p>I kind of agree with this notion, but it is not limited to blockchains or cryptocurrencies. I had discussions about using deep learning on a problem that was very ill suited for machine learning approaches (in the end it was solved by regular expressions and some simple statistics). Other overhyped technologies include: microservices, nosql-databases, rdf/sparql/semantic web and IoT-devices. Some items on this list were overhyped in the past, but have found a reasonable technological ecosystem in fields that are suited to it, like rdf. I think the same will happen with the blockchain.
> Everyone who is talking positively about cryptocurrencies and making hyperbolic claims seems to have invested in them.<p>I thought this was an interesting claim to use as a disqualifier. If you see the promise of blockchain, why <i>wouldn't</i> you invest in them?
The benefits of blockchain outweigh the initial costs involved in kickstarting the ecosystem. The same initial flurry of investment happened when the internet was created. Look how that turned out.
I don't understand the high horse.<p>Accept the offer, rake in the cash, move on.<p>Whether or not the company eventually becomes a success does not affect the money you have raked in.<p>Be greedy, the investors are. If you're an engineer, you're the needed fuel they need for their fire.
He's probably trying to not offend the company by not being more specific, but given the information offered -- why even apply/interview for a blockchain job if these are his objections (too much hype, PoW is bad)?
This is refreshing to read. I share similar opinions as the author and also do not have any investments in cryptocurrencies. However, the technology itself and the original intent is still very interesting to me.
It does suck because blockchain technology does seem intriguing and cool, but there's so much dirty money floating around the ecosystem right now I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
Like this author and many here I've been dismissive of the blockchain ecosystem as it stands. Especially Bitcoin, for while I appreciate the potential of Ethereum as a platform in itself, Bitcoin seems much less flexible.<p>However my thinking has begun to change since reading over the technical specs of the Bitcoin Lightning Network.<p>The basic idea is that open payment channels of liquidity will be part of a payments routing scheme, directed from me to whatever address I want to deposit funds into. You can read about it here [1].<p>This system is still being developed but if it works it could reinvigorate Bitcoin.<p>[1]: <a href="https://lightning.network" rel="nofollow">https://lightning.network</a>
Bitcoin and proof of work consensus is just the tip of the iceberg. Since then, lots of advancement happened in the field. You can easily choose from different implementations of prof stake or DAG systems.<p>You can have a bird's eye view of most common platforms on this infographic:<p><a href="https://medium.com/world-of-blockchains/the-history-of-blockchain-infographic-900e940ee6ec" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/world-of-blockchains/the-history-of-block...</a>
Hi, I'm Max. I gave the talk that this article mentions, and have helped publish papers about BeyondCorp over the last few years. At Google I work in the Cloud CTO Office. I'm eager to get your feedback on what we can explain better, and answer your questions.
I have a friend running a cryptocurrency company and wants me to come work for him. I'd be more attracted if it weren't so far away but either way it's still just so sketchy to me.
I thought there might be more depth into why this person decided to turn down the job offer. The reader can only try to infer the reason from the author's take on the space.
He turned down a much higher salary AND "REMOTE WORK!" just because he didn't want to be "associated" with the current state of bitcoin. Remote work possibilities are extremely rare, especially high paying ones.<p>My advice would be, take the job and enjoy it while it lasts.<p>He didn't say much about the company. But, just watch out for scams. If it's not a real company, they might just be trying to get your bank account information or something in which case you definately want to stear clear
Bitcoin mining will spur competition for the cheapest energy in the world once there is parity with mining chips (12-18 months away). We're hitting the upper limit on what is possible in the ASIC chips.<p>Every 10 minutes, a $200,000 bounty is given to the Bitcoin miner with the cheapest electricity + computing power. So once everyone has the same chips, what's the advantage miners can use? Cheap electricity.<p>Bitcoin miners will do more for renewable energy than many governments around the world.
99% it was just some marketing drone wanting to find any developers to cut a ECR20 for their scamtoken. You are right to avoid this. BTW if any engineers read this, treat 99% of unsolicited 'blockchain jobs' as the scam that they are.<p>Cutting and pasting solidity smartcontracts doesn't make you a blockchain developer :-)
I'm always curious how blockchain developers make money except for holding coins or doing the one-time ICO...<p>I started a new thread for this <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16206218" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16206218</a>
It is interesting how grievance posts have such an easy time on HN, and how willing the audience is to put aside basic cynicism (AMP is another easy target for these sorts of posts).<p>I am going to be a little more suspicious and say that the OP never had a job offer for a "blockchain implementation", but instead posted the standard, rather empty cynical fare with the job offer justification. Lumping in all blockchain implementations and then trying to hang every possible downside is as absurd as decrying a hypothetical video handling job because pornography exploitation exists. It doesn't follow, and makes the argument asinine.