In 2018 I started working in blockchain/cryptocurrency stuff at Algorand. They had a clever new system that fixed the gigawatt-waste problem of Bitcoin and was 100x faster, and I figured "I guess blockchain is something people want, and this is good tech, I'll try it".
I spent 4 years there and was always proud of the engineering quality and the culture had a healthy skepticism and distance from the hype around blockchain things.
What I really wanted from the dream of cryptocurrency is to unseat the Visa/MC duopoly and their $.30+3% drain on every transaction. I wanted transactions of any size, censorship resistant, for $0.01 or less. But current climate and laws prevent that.
I'm pretty tired of crypto-bro culture. I don't care about NFTs. Nobody should care about NFTs. "shitcoins" are explicitly value-less and people in the biz call them shitcoins and yet still worry about optimizing their tech to support more shitcoins. This sucks.
Crypto-bros apparently don't care that Twitter is a cesspool and feeding that machine makes the world a worse place. And they don't care that Bitcoin wastes gigawatts per year and must be doomed to fail.
One of the biggest innovations of Bitcoin may be that it created a distributed leaderless Ponzi scheme. Hype it enough and create the next generation of suckers to buy in and buy out your share at a profit.
The crypto markets seem to be entirely hype driven. Worse tech with more hype can beat better tech. It's a big downer when I want to take pride in working on better tech. I no longer care to take a bet on which blockchains will survive to 5 or 10 years from now. I quit.
New job: try to make the world a better place through good social media (and make a buck in the process) at Bluesky Social. I'll mostly be on backend just trying to keep the place running reliably and efficiently, but I'll be doing my part on new features too.
Follow me there at:
https://bsky.app/profile/bolson.bsky.social
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