> DeFi on Ethereum is replicating the existing financial system, so by criticizing this, you're essentially also criticizing the legacy financial system.
Checkmate nOcOiNeRs. If you criticize my pyramid scheme network, you're actually criticizing the complex global financial system, because r/ethereum told me they're basically one in the same.
How many mortgages are settled at any level of the "financial stack" with DeFi? None.
How many bond payments have been paid out at any level of the "financial stack" with DeFi? None.
How many registered securities have been traded with DeFi handling any level of the "financial stack"? None.
If you want to use your "financial stack" metaphor, DeFi is like using a bluetooth smart dildo bootloader as the back end for a full stack web application. Sure, the stack you speak of exists, but there is nowhere that any programmer would ever seriously think to put that thing.
Stop arguing semantics and actually point to a legitimate use-case that someone outside the crypto space would have for DeFi (even if it is at a "lower level" of the fin stack).
Santander bank has settled at least 20 million in bonds directly on Ethereum (shorturl.at/lnFNV)
The applications you're talking about require infrastructure first. That's like criticizing devs in the 90s that an app like Netflix doesn't exist yet. Hmm I wonder why Netflix wasn't viable in the 1990s.
As for a simple "primitive" use case, I have a lot of my cash savings in DAI and I get 4% interest on it. There are a multitude of other use cases, if you care to look.
But you don't care, because it's obvious you think it's all just a scam, so there's no point even discussing any of this with you.
It's obvious that it's mostly a scam because the number of crappy altcoins, the number of wallets that ended up failing because they were criminal fronts or scams, and the absolute failure to demonstrate even one killer application show the reality of this.
I'm wondering how much of those coins that accrue "interest" you'll actually be able to offload into cold, hard cash that can be used to purchase goods.
Ugh. The mind of a narcissist on full display here.
Want to have a comfortable position with decent growth opportunities over time, and fair compensation? You must be some bottom-feeding moron who doesn't understand that [Unicorn Co]'s valuation just rose 4x YoY.
Think you can be happy at a company like Apple making six figures while unemployment is at record levels, and people are being bankrupted by hospital bills and shuttered businesses? clap emojis THINK ABOUT YOUR PERSONAL BRAND. This girl learned everything Apple had to teach her in 6 months. You can't possibly expect to just switch departments, or ask for more responsibilities to continue learning anything at a company like that!
It's incredible how insulated developers in the Bay Area can be. I would love to see how quickly all of this advice falls apart for an engineer in Portland, or Minneapolis, or just about any country besides the United States, where six-figure software jobs aren't so easy to come by.
Pretty much this. The author really seems to live in a bubble.
Additionally, if you're anything but a software developer, e.g. you're a process (chemical) engineer, this advice doesn't work in the slightest. New chemical companies don't open up in a bedroom every year, so you can't hop around that quickly. This applies to every engineering profession except for software development (/...engineering)
What about feelings of regret later down the line? I already regret not doing more in my life in my teenage years (I spent it all studying alone). I cannot imagine what feelings of regret I would have if I spent all of my 20s working non-stop.
I am pretty sure I am not going to be on my death bed, surrounded by loving family, yet thinking about that job working on the Uber-for-cats middleware stack that was technically challenging, so impactful and aligned so well with my future career goals.
I was reading the article going "Yeah! This is exactly what I need to hear!" until I got to the sentence "This is what we always say at UberEats" and had to close the tab.
> Ugh. The mind of a narcissist on full display here.
Is this ad-hominem really necessary? The author didn't make character attacks on anyone, I don't see why you feel the need to do so.
> You must be some bottom-feeding moron who doesn't understand that [Unicorn Co]'s valuation just rose 4x YoY.
Contrast this to what the author actually said:
"Optimizing learning over money early in your career.
Since I left Apple, its stock has almost tripled while Uber's stock has been... I probably would be better off financially had I stayed. However, what I learned at Uber is way more valuable to me, given my career aspirations."
I'm genuinely surprised that the HN community thinks a toxic comment like this is upvote-worthy
It's brash for sure, but if its garnering upvotes its likely because it struck enough of a cord to overcome HNs dislike for personal attacks. I think people are tired of blog posts telling them what to prioritize in life.
> I'm genuinely surprised that the HN community thinks a toxic comment like this is upvote-worthy
Is this a̶d̶-̶h̶o̶m̶i̶n̶e̶m̶ [EDIT: attack] really necessary? I'm sharing a thought about the ridiculous nature of bay area hustle culture.
> Contrast this to what the author actually said: "Optimizing learning over money early in your career.
Contrast that to what she goes on to say in the article itself. She laments on how she missed out on Uber stock rising by not ditching Apple sooner. She then pulls a figure out of thin-air about how much net worth you're going to lose by "wasting" your career on any given year by not following her arbitrary framework for self-worth.
"Optimizing learning over money early in your career" would bear far more weight if she actually used an example like going into academia, or joining a tiny startup with low pay. Going from one 150k+ position to another 150k+ position with (gasp) lower performing stocks (!!) is hardly a sacrifice. Moreover, she speaks as if she already knew Uber stock was going to go down when she joined. Uber happened to tank Apple happened to rise. But she acts like she factored that into her decision before she left Apple.
I'm genuinely surprised some people still can't recognize how absolutely out-of-touch it sounds to lament over a "wasted" year of career at Apple, while most of the world is just trying to get by. Likewise, claiming you stopped finding opportunities to learn anything at Apple after only 6 months sounds like self-inflating bullshit.
So, I hope I have eased your surprise. It's toxic to tell people that they're wasting their career by valuing stability and work-life balance over weird learning frameworks, and net-worth. It's not toxic to call out such privileged fools for doing so.
It's certainly a different mindset. I don't really do software development any longer. But if I were at Apple, barring a bad situation that I was unable to resolve for some reason--which I've been in before and have been able to switch managers--I'd think very long and hard before switching companies, perhaps especially to Uber.
Maybe if you really want to do a startup? Perhaps one could learn a bit more at Apple first. And to the point later in the post about the loss of net worth. I'm pretty sure sticking around Apple for a bit as a young person is not going to cripple your chances of retirement.
"Blockchain groups now exist at every major university in the world and the number of people who own some kind of crypto digital asset continues to rise."
The same could be said about alt-right cliques or communist groups, both of which are growing too. Not such a great metric for progress.
“The idea of cryptoeconomics becoming embedded in the 5G video and voice-AI internet is sort of inevitable.”
Really? I've got friends doing research and development related to those fields and they seem to have a very different view.
“Cryptoeconomics must be tethered...”
lol.
"...to and converge with the key exponential technologies of the future: quantum computing, machine learning, the Voice-AI interface, 3D printing, Biotechnology and whatever other important changes to human life occur from the intersection of technologies."
The rest of your article seems to be spewing incessant buzzwords without actually outlining any coherent argument or model for how this would actually work.
Finally, as much as I don't want to use ad hominem, it seems fairly unlikely that a content writer has any kind of professional knowledge of economics or technology to actually make any accurate predictions about the future of either field. Predicting the future of either field is extremely difficult, even for experts. Hand waving and claiming things as "inevitable" does not put you on the same level as a thought leader, it puts you on the same level as a cult preacher.
I think you just have a lot of pot shots to take against Tesla (most of which seem to have no precedent??), and want to project them onto this situation. This story relates to an internal email Musk sent around, telling staff to speak up about suspicious behaviour. It's not like he brought this to a shareholders meeting.
And they shouldn't. News should not be determined by its shareholders. The idea that such privileges should be able to be purchased is so incomprehensibly stupid, I'm at a loss for words.
It's obvious when the Washington Post writes articles about Amazon that there's a conflict of interest. They definitely write them, but I don't remember anyone sharing any stories from them about e.g. the HQ2 process. People know to look elsewhere. And conversely, the moment the Post publishes a news (not opinion) article about how every city should want to be HQ2, or worse, mentions it off-hand in an article about something else, everyone knows not to trust that and possibly to lose trust in the news source in general. So they don't.
It's not obvious when ownership is a thousand pseudonymous private keys when there's a conflict of interest. If a random article about a random company looks a little more negative than it should be, who knows if the current pseudonymous owners are shorting that company?
Publicly-disclosed ownership of the media by the rich has a ton of disadvantages, yes. But I don't the blockchain solving any of those disadvantages, and I see it introducing a new one that is specifically avoided by publicly-disclosed ownership by the rich.
How many people are actually informed that the Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos? How many people know that Jeff Bezos has contracts with the CIA[1] & sits on a pentagon board[2]? I doubt many. It's one of the few "left" wing newspapers I refuse to read for the reasons above.
I'm not arguing for this blockchain solution, I think it makes things worse exactly as you said.
Every time the Washington Post mentions Bezos, or a company he owns, even in the abstract (for instance, in this spaceflight article, which mentions blue origin: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/06/15/f... ), they say that Jeff Bezos owns the washington post, in those exact words.
Given that the President of the United States went on a yelling spree recently about Bezos' ownership, I'd say most people who can distinguish the Washington Post from the Washington Times (owned by Sun Myung Moon's religion and absurdly right-wing) also know who owns the Post.
(Which isn't to say everyone knows that either—a lot of people seem to take the Times equally seriously—but solving the problem of bad-faith media existing is another one entirely, and quite probably the answer is it shouldn't be solved at all.)
Even if blockchain DNS systems were production quality - which they're far from - why is a 'central authority' inherently bad? The entirety of cloud computing, and the modern internet, is based on the pretense of giving your entire infrastructure to a centralized authority. "Oh, but what if your centralized cloud provider is actually evil and incompetent", the free markets allow you to change providers until you have a provider with absolute highest quality.
> Even if blockchain DNS systems were production quality - which they're far from
That's not an argument against building something...
> which they're far from - why is a 'central authority' inherently bad?
They're not. Sometimes you want a central authority, and sometimes you don't. Both modes can be good. But previously central authorities were necessary due to the physics of DNS. Blockchain enables a new mode. Now the two modes can compete, and we can reach a new equilibrium with both, or one can win out. That's what's cool about it.
>That's not an argument against building something...
At which point did I argue building things is bad? I actually took a lot of time to learn Ethereum smart contract development just to get to the bottom of the whole blockchain ecosystem. Learning and building are almost never bad things.
I'm not bashing the idea of competition between blockchain and traditional centralized authorities either. I'm extremely pro-competition. I'm bashing the fact that all - yes, all - blockchain applications provide negative value compared to their traditional counterparts. The argument that blockchain enthusiasts use to justify their support for such low-quality infrastructure is this philosophy that having no centralized authority is, by itself, valuable. This is what I'm bashing.
If my cloud provider is bad, I can switch to another one or self-host.
You can't switch from the ICANN, no matter which domain you chose, it depends on them, they effectively have a monopoly. I want to self host my domain name.
There's a fair point to be made there. But then I would ask which solution is best: lobbying hard enough to democratize the organizational structure of ICANN, creating a competitive ecosystem, or resorting exclusively to a ledger of entries with no capacity to be modified according to legalities, attacks, or otherwise? What if someone spams the ledger with too many names? What if someone takes domains that should be illegal for them to possess? What if someone takes someone else's private key? What if an organization gets their private key stolen? The vectors for exploitation don't just disappear because you have a decentralized system. The exploitative behaviour just changes.
All these issues currently exist with the existing domain name system as well.
> What if someone spams the ledger with too many names
You need to pay in coins to register a namecoin domain so this attack won't work.
> What if someone takes domains that should be illegal for them to possess?
This should be up to courts to decide if the name is illegal and handle it over, not to some random organisation like the ICANN which has no legal basis.
> What if someone takes someone else's private key?
Same as if some gets access to your registrar password right now, nothing changes with that.
> What if an organization gets their private key stolen?
Again, same as before, nothing is improved or changed by a blockchain here.
Banks are doing this from a perspective of risk management. But I will bet any number of Bitcoin that crypto nerds will construe this as a narrative that the big banks are attacking them once again.
There are multiple potential explanations. I think disallowing commerce without an agreeable substitute, like immediately transferring or escrowing money from other accounts, is an unacceptable inconvenience. Often times, a person wants the protection of a credit card, while having sufficient assets to purchase in cash or repay the card corp. If anything, that a debit card lacks similar protections of a credit card is absurd and inconvenient per skimming and missing fringe benefits like travel insurance.
Debit and credit are the only methods for commerce with almost any third party. Transferring and escrow payments require direct channels that Wells Fargo does not want to negotiate. Regardless of differences between debit and credit, debit is at least backed by direct account balances. Credit is not. Chargebacks would also be a nightmare for credit cards.
Even if it's deemed unacceptable to disallow over-risked services like credit cards to purchase cryptocurrency, then the beauty is that cryptocurrency purchasers can migrate their loans, and savings to another banking provider who will service the headache of credit-backed cryptocurrency investments.
Open source contributions do not cover even scratch the surface of depth needed to be a software developer. Oh, you resolved that issue in a related repo? That's awesome. Now, for our repo we need you to design an entire system effectively, work well with our other developers, and meet whatever deadlines we prescribe. Of course, if you're someone that accomplishes all of that in the open source community, then your open source work definitely 'cuts through the bullshit'. But the people who meet those criteria are a small subset of even the active open source community. In general, someone's 50 line commit to an open source repo does not tell me much more than them knowing the technology, and being able to complete tasks within a time period of undefined length.
Design work is extremely different from developer work. Design work is usually publicly available, and each piece often stands on its own. Paid developer work is usually not publicly visible, and a lot of projects require working with teams. The type of work that goes on a Github profile, therefore, is usually unpaid work where you get to create your own project, and pick your own codebase. In this sense, you're comparing apples to oranges.
Checkmate nOcOiNeRs. If you criticize my pyramid scheme network, you're actually criticizing the complex global financial system, because r/ethereum told me they're basically one in the same.
How many mortgages are settled at any level of the "financial stack" with DeFi? None.
How many bond payments have been paid out at any level of the "financial stack" with DeFi? None.
How many registered securities have been traded with DeFi handling any level of the "financial stack"? None.
If you want to use your "financial stack" metaphor, DeFi is like using a bluetooth smart dildo bootloader as the back end for a full stack web application. Sure, the stack you speak of exists, but there is nowhere that any programmer would ever seriously think to put that thing.
Stop arguing semantics and actually point to a legitimate use-case that someone outside the crypto space would have for DeFi (even if it is at a "lower level" of the fin stack).