Tech Execs and Engineers Are Quitting Large Companies For 'Once-in-Generation' Opportunity With Crypto (nytimes.com) 116
An anonymous reader shares a report : Ms. Carter is part of a wave of executives and engineers leaving cushy jobs at Google, Amazon, Apple and other large tech companies -- some of which pay millions of dollars in annual compensation -- to chase what they see as a once-in-a-generation opportunity. That next big thing is crypto, they said, a catchall designation that includes digital currencies like Bitcoin and products like nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, that rely on the blockchain. Silicon Valley is now awash with stories of people riding seemingly ridiculous crypto investments like Dogecoin, a digital coin based on a dog meme, to life-changing wealth. Bitcoin has soared around 60 percent this year, while Ether, the cryptocurrency tied to the Ethereum blockchain, has increased more than fivefold in value.
But beyond that speculative mania, a growing contingent of the tech industry's best and brightest sees a transformational moment that comes along once every few decades and rewards those who spot the seismic shift before the rest of the world. With crypto, they see historical parallels to how the personal computer and the internet were once ridiculed, only to upend the status quo and mint a new generation of billionaires. Investors, too, have flooded in. They have poured more than $28 billion into global crypto and blockchain start-ups this year, four times the total in 2020, according to PitchBook, a firm that tracks private investments. More than $3 billion has gone into NFT companies alone. "There is a giant sucking sound coming from crypto," said Sridhar Ramaswamy, chief executive of search engine start-up Neeva and a former Google executive, who competes with crypto companies for talent. "It feels a bit like the 1990s and the birth of the internet all over again. It's that early, that chaotic and that much full of opportunity."
[...] The growing ranks of true believers say crypto can change the world by creating a more decentralized internet that is not controlled by a handful of companies. While such possibilities have existed since Bitcoin emerged in 2009, crypto products such as NFTs broke through to the mainstream only this year. That has accelerated the exodus from Big Tech companies into the crypto world. This month, Brian Roberts, the chief financial officer of Lyft, left the ride-hailing company to join OpenSea, a popular crypto start-up."I've seen enough cycles and paradigm shifts to be cognizant when something this big is just emerging," he said in an email. "We are Day 1 in terms of NFTs and their impact."
But beyond that speculative mania, a growing contingent of the tech industry's best and brightest sees a transformational moment that comes along once every few decades and rewards those who spot the seismic shift before the rest of the world. With crypto, they see historical parallels to how the personal computer and the internet were once ridiculed, only to upend the status quo and mint a new generation of billionaires. Investors, too, have flooded in. They have poured more than $28 billion into global crypto and blockchain start-ups this year, four times the total in 2020, according to PitchBook, a firm that tracks private investments. More than $3 billion has gone into NFT companies alone. "There is a giant sucking sound coming from crypto," said Sridhar Ramaswamy, chief executive of search engine start-up Neeva and a former Google executive, who competes with crypto companies for talent. "It feels a bit like the 1990s and the birth of the internet all over again. It's that early, that chaotic and that much full of opportunity."
[...] The growing ranks of true believers say crypto can change the world by creating a more decentralized internet that is not controlled by a handful of companies. While such possibilities have existed since Bitcoin emerged in 2009, crypto products such as NFTs broke through to the mainstream only this year. That has accelerated the exodus from Big Tech companies into the crypto world. This month, Brian Roberts, the chief financial officer of Lyft, left the ride-hailing company to join OpenSea, a popular crypto start-up."I've seen enough cycles and paradigm shifts to be cognizant when something this big is just emerging," he said in an email. "We are Day 1 in terms of NFTs and their impact."
Lemmings (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sounds like a slashdot advertisement, the continual recruitment and proselytation efforts of crypto holders trying to get the price to go up.
Re: Lemmings (Score:3)
Re:Lemmings (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually the *exact* opposite of lemmings; more like a Ponzi scheme. The safest place to be is in the front of the mob.
Most of these people are going to be fine when the industry goes belly up; it's people late to the party who will get burned.
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What happens when the US economy goes belly up?
Either that, or the US economy will not go belly up any time soon, and crypto will not go belly up any time soon. (It's a bit childish to think that the US economy and crypto will NEVER go belly up. In 500 years? In 1000 years?)
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Probably not much. This isn't like China where an entire layer of government is funded by real estate speculation. This is drawing off labor and brain power from an industry that has disruption of the status quo as its Holy Grail.
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Cryptocurrencies haven't produced any meaningful value for anyone other than hustlers, ransomware operators, and the like. They have done very little to facilitate the exchange of goods and services, certainly not to match the scale of the materials and energy they consume.
The US economy, while it will certainly explode at some point, has produced all kinds of things for people.
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Come on now. It's saved a lot of trips to the Cayman islands to set up bank accounts.
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What happens when the US economy goes belly up?
Either that, or the US economy will not go belly up any time soon, and crypto will not go belly up any time soon. (It's a bit childish to think that the US economy and crypto will NEVER go belly up. In 500 years? In 1000 years?)
Crypto will absolutely collapse like the house of cards that it is. I doubt the US economy will be allowed to collapse, due to the knock on effects, and what that would do to other economies. But I do see other countries moving away from the US, so that protection will not last forever.
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Depends what a US collapse might look like. Would they ever default on T-bills? Unlikely, they'll just print more money. Would a collapse look like hyperinflation and could that happen? I guess we'll see...
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No, the safest place to be is not in the mob at all. People who think they're joining toward the front of the mob sometimes discover they're actually at the back when the bubble pops, because the timing of the pop is unpredictable.
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Tulips are probably also nicer to look at than dollar bills. But, you can just plant your own tulip crop and grow a million of them. You can't (legally) print your own US dollars, and you can't (mathematically) print your own Bitcoins.
Re: Lemmings (Score:2)
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" they see historical parallels to how the personal computer and the internet were once ridiculed"
LOL!
Make sense. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Make sense. (Score:3)
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I prefer picking up pennies in front of a steam roller. Much safer.
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By extension, if you find the momentum in any way at risk as a late comer, you go to more and more extreme measures to convince people that the scheme can work for them. Like say inundating the media with hyperbole that society is going to be fundamentally different thanks to crypto-currency/tokens and if you get in now you can be rich and if you delay you run the risk of being left behind entirely in the new world order.
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That's what surprises me about this article. Isn't now a bit late to be getting in early? Bitcoin hit $20K four years ago, at the end of 2017. It has tripled once more since then, which is still quite good, but doesn't seem quite "sell the farm to go sell shovels in San Francisco"-worthy.
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+1
Re: Make sense. (Score:4, Insightful)
They're not buying bitcoin. They're going to start up companies that, um, do some stuff with, uh, crypto blockchain NFTs.
It does seem like maybe they're ignoring how all the companies that tried to do that eventually figured out that blockchain isn't actually good for much. But there's this web 3.0 thing now (as of last week IIRC), and web 2.0 turned out to be a big deal so....
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They're not buying bitcoin. They're going to start up companies that, um, do some stuff with, uh, crypto blockchain NFTs.
Yep. I have cryptocurrency company recruiters beating down my virtual door, and they're offering outrageous pay. From a purely financial perspective I think it would be a very good idea to take their money, sock the extra $500k per year away (well, as much of it as Uncle Sam doesn't take), and retire a few years earlier. I would, however, feel like I was cashing in on widespread idiocy, and making the world a worse place. I already make more than enough money to do what I want, and I enjoy what I do, who
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The way a ponzi scheme works is that the earlier you join, the more you can make. You just need to cash out before new people stop joining in and liquidity dries up.
This Ponzi scheme has been going for long enough now that "joining early" is a laughable idea.
The money's all gone people. All that's left is suckers at the bottom and pumpers/dumpers at the top.
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Or the opportunity they see is to take a bunch of dumb investors money... many probably recall the 2000 tech bubble.
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The 2000 tech bubble was caused by handing over money to tech companies that had insane valuations. Guess what will happen in 2022 when the fed raises their rates (to control inflation) and many tech companies go pop?
Re:Make sense. (Score:4, Insightful)
in the 80's kids wasted their money on little paper cards of cartoon figures or sports stars and if you wanted art you sold it at some flea market
NFT's are the 21st version
Re: Make sense. (Score:3)
Came to say this, just differently: staying away from crypto is kind of an intelligence test. You know, like the ones they use to put recruits through. Whoever leaves for that you don't want in key positions of your company anyway.
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Yep. If these people are really leaving cushy jobs for "crypto" then they probably won't be missed.
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It goes both ways. People heavily investing in bitcoin in the earliest days also seemed like dumb motherfuckers, but the real dumb motherfuckers were the ones laughing at them (I certainly did my share of dumb motherfucking too back then metaphorically speaking).
The latest NFT craze seems like insanity to me, and Web 3.0 also seems like a dead end (a world where corporations and governments don't control everything is just so blissfully naive), but now that I am in my mid-forties I know can safely say I ha
The grand master plan of crypto (Score:5, Interesting)
The plan for all cryptocurrencies isn't what you think it is. It's more sinister than the egalitarian image the crypto boys portray for it.
After the 2008 financial meltdown, cryptocurrencies were born out of it, declared to be the means by which people could be freed from banks/governments, and promised to avoid any such future meltdowns from happening ever again.
But the crypto boys watched closely the result of that meltdown, and formulated their plan: create a new form of currency, and for it a new financial system detached from traditional ones (those burdened by "gorvernments and regulations") - they called it "DeFi" for "Decentralized Finance", but its dirty little secret is that it's really "Deregulated Finance".
Their plan is to make this new money be adopted by the masses, so they start it off with a low price, then gradually increase it, by virtue of them just pulling numbers out of thin air for its value, until it catches the attention of the masses - then it gets more and more "valuable" from the collective faith of its given value ("network effect"), until traditional institutions start to notice and, greedy as they are, want in on the action too.
So now those that got in at the ground floor have gained all this "value" out of thin air, and once they're ready, they'll pull out all pretty much at once - that it'll create a sell-off panic, and a new meltdown is born! And because of their "De[regulated]Fi" system, the bros have already shifted all the risks away from themselves onto others, so they'll make out like bandits, leaving everyone else to "hodl" the bag.
But the bros were really observant about that last meltdown - and noticed all the "bailouts" the big banks got - so as they were shifting the risks to others, they increased their investments into what would get the next bailouts - so in the end they'll make out like bandits twice: the first time from suckering everyone else into their pump-and-dump scam, and again once they benefit from the bailouts that'll get handed out.
And there you have it folks, the real master plan of crypto.
--
Those who fail to accept it will mod the truth down to -1. -Prof. Feynman
Re:The grand master plan of crypto (Score:5, Informative)
Blockchain = the technology, useful, interesting and ingenious.
Distributed Ledger = the accounting aspect layered on top of blockchain, decentralized, no governance, near instant transfer anywhere
Crypto = the financial aspect layered on top of ledgers, now you're mixing money with technology and there is incentive to abuse it
Ponzi schemes = the last layer on top of crypto...
The technology isn't bad. It's like nuclear science and the difference between nuclear plants and nuclear bombs. Any tech can be abused and misused. It doesn't mean the underlying technology is bad.
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Your base layer should really be hash/Merkle trees. Interesting? Yeah. Ingenious? Sure. Useful? You bet, great for CS exam questions since the 90s, and a few real-world things like Git.
Blockchain combines hash trees with Satoshi's proof of work solution to the distributed trust problem. Interesting? Yup. Ingenious? Sure, okay. Useful? Uh... well, Satoshi thought it would be good for a currency, but it turns it out makes a pretty shitty one. People who didn't know how it works though it would be good for thi
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The paper dollar has been separated from the gold backing for a few decades now. It seems to be humming along just fine on "faith".
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And there you have it folks, the real master plan of crypto.
Nice conspiracy theory, but the "crypto bros" are far too disorganized and believe their own hype too much for anything like that. Oh, there may be one or two both bright and cynical enough for your scheme, but the implication of your post is that there's some tight network with a "master plan". It ain't so, and if it were we'd know it not though observation and guessing but because many of them would blab.
Once in a generation opportunity (Score:2)
i.e. make off of the current bubble before it bursts - the next bubble being in 10 years or so - the next generation.
These people missed the internet bubble and the real estate bubble, they're not gonna miss out on the cryptocurrency bubble!
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Yeah, anyone who says "once in a generation opportunity" hasn't actually lived a full generation (or they weren't paying attention).
no crypto bubble (Score:5, Funny)
There is absolutely no crypto bubble.
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Once in a generation ponzi scheme (Score:5, Insightful)
Without fiat to give it value.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Everything with crypto is compared to the US dollar, even though it's supposed to be its own currency.
Did you ever notice how the bitcoin bros are always boasting about the price of it while trashing fiat currencies? And how they always use a fiat value to compare its price with?
Without fiat to give it value, their precious bitcoin is worthless.
Re:Without fiat to give it value.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The "fiat" story is their excuse. Someone says "but it's not backed by anything, just the gullibility of the holders", and then they naively respond "but all currency is fiat, the dollar could go to zero tomorrow, it's no longer backed by our precious precious gold and the fed prints out too much and it's all doomed! Doomed I tell you! Now buy my crypto coins!" Really, the only reason they bring up "fiat" is that they try to compare it to the dollar and make a false equivalence.
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The "fiat" story is their excuse. Someone says "but it's not backed by anything, just the gullibility of the holders"
And this first statement is a complete falsehood. Oh, I don't think people who say it are lying; they just don't know what they're talking about. Fiat currency generated through fractional-reserve lending is more real than any other form of currency has been since we abandoned barter (which was as debt-based as modern fiat currency, but that's a story for another post. Read "Debt: The First 5000 Years" if you want to know more).
What backs every other non-commodity medium of exchange, and even commodities
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Without fiat to give it value, their precious bitcoin is worthless.
Well, technically fiat currency is worthless too. Government-backed currencies lack any real value since everyone came off the gold standard which is why things like hyper-inflation can happen - a fiat currency is only worth what people think it is worth just like bitcoin.
The difference is that fiat currencies are incredibly useful because, for the most part, governments do everything they can to ensure that their value is stable so that fiat currencies can be used to enormously facilitate trade. Compar
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Sucking Sound (Score:5, Insightful)
Only words of truth in the whole article, except the sucking sound is from suckers buying in (and getting the money sucked out of their wallets).
crypto regulations is going to kill it's big value (Score:2)
crypto regulations is going to kill it's big value
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Crypto regulations ARE going to push trades back to person-to-person transactions. You can't do this with the traditional stock market without a great deal of trouble. How many people have ever touched the actual stock certificates of the companies they own? It's a game that only brokers get to play. With crypto, everyone has their own card deck. (Assuming you actually take the crypto off the exchange before a regulatory strangling.)
History Rhyming (Score:3, Insightful)
Skip school learn Microsoft Front Page, make $$$ (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in the 1990's, a lot of companies were upgrading their old computer infrastructure, to prepare for the Y2k.
Being that they are upgrading a lot of equipment, which included getting rid of mainframes that connected via Serial ports, to PC's with TCP/IP Eathernet connections these companies found that it was rather affordable, and beneficial to have their TCP/IP Intranets hooked into the Internet, so data can be shared with partner, and soon customers used dial-up SLIP and PPP protocols to connect their home PC's to the internet to access their works computers and emails.
Soon a good number of people possibly customers can access your companies computers. So making a webpage which was basically all your sales brochures became popular, and a lot of people used them to keep informed on what these companies were doing.
The popularity of their websites, and the visibility they offered combined with newly created search engines to allow for people to search for your services, meant they should invest more into this new technology.
Being a new technology, they didn't quite grasp what was needed, so they often hired (at a rather high rate for what the job was) Web Site Developers, who often didn't even know HTML, but could use the WYSIWYG HTML editor to make attractive and functional webpages for the companies. Being this was a high paid low skill job, We got a lot of people dropping out of school to be Web Page Makers.
By the early 2000's most of these companies had upgraded their systems, with a Glut of Under-skilled employees demanding high pay for jobs that they mostly have all completed by now, and unable to adapt the companies to "Web 2.0" Soon got put on the chopping block, with the rise of Out Sourcing, meant any additional work can be sourced for cheaper.
A lot of them then turned to real-estate.
But their careers has been trying to get onto the ground floor of the next big things, for it to become a long term success for them to be the big man.
The Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg of the world, who got onto the next big thing and made it big, is so rare, that you are better off trying to win the lottery, than being lucky to get onto the next big things and become the lead in it.
Still the better plan is to get educated, with a particular career path in mind, work for that career path, and be flexible enough to adapt to when that path has changed, you may not be the top 1%, but you will have a job that you feel good doing, and getting compensated over time enough to live well. Vs Jumping into being a new guy in the industry all your life.
Re:Skip school learn Microsoft Front Page, make $$ (Score:5, Interesting)
The Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg of the world, who got onto the next big thing and made it big, is so rare, that you are better off trying to win the lottery
It's rare to become an industry leader like them, but there have been plenty of smaller players who have made fortunes riding the same wave as these guys, or just by coasting in their wake. Even if you've probably never heard of them or their companies.
The thing with crypto is: fortunes have already been made even before we've figured out a good use case that warrants all the hype. In a few cases, those fortunes came from building something with actual utility (within the context of cryptocurrency), like the guys who set up crypto exchanges. But in most cases it's from pure speculation; Dogecoin being boosted by Musk, or Pornrockets (yes it exists) by word-of-mouth. And I suspect that all that talent is attracted to crypto either because of the lure of those fortunes, or by the notion that these fortunes mean that there is something meaningful and world-changing happening around crypto.
But hey, if you already made something of a name for yourself, and some fintech startup offers to double your salary and gives you stock options that just might vest before they crater, or (even better) looks like they might be acquired by some bigger fish, then it might make sense to switch.
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youre missing all the fun man! ( and the money ) ( and the unemployment insurance free time when you get fired 20 times in 20 years. )
its like retiring 20 times before you turn 65 you cant beat it.
Historical Parallels (Score:2)
Yup, people ridiculed me for investing all my money in Commodore Computers and PETS.COM but now my portfolio is worth ... Oh No!!!
This is too comical! (Score:2)
With crypto, they see historical parallels to how the personal computer and the internet were once ridiculed, only to upend the status quo and mint a new generation of billionaires
Yeah, and there are several parallels with past bubbles as well - oh but let's not mention that inconvenient fact here...
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Indeed. Nobody with a clue ever ridiculed the Internet or PCs. Sure, there were always isolated _aspects_ to ridicule, but for the whole idea, anybody with a clue always understood it is a powerful thing. Now, for the ridiculously named "crypto", people with a clue are ridiculing it, along with the morons that think it is in any way a game-changer or even important. The only thing it nicely demonstrates is how many people can not even understand basic things about reality.
Still money to be made (Score:2)
As long as interest r
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"As long as interest rates remain low people can park money in cryptocurrency. If interest rates rise over 4 or 5% though people will want to take their money out to pay off loans and mortgages."
Technically, the same thing applies to stocks. Holy crap, 2022 is going to be a roller coaster.
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None of them have the private key to the wallet their money is in, its all on some exchange.
Wait, what?
It's been a LONG time since I looked into bitcoin with any seriousness (circa 2010? or 2011? I forget when the Linux Outlaws episode about bitcoin was) and my memory is a bit fuzzy, but as I recall, having the private key to your wallet and the credentials associated with it was basically the only way you *had* a bitcoin wallet, right?
When is it coming? (Score:5, Insightful)
The effects are visible in lots of places, except in actual applications. Cryptocurrencies are mainly used for trading cryptocurrencies and maybe to a small extent for drug trades and ransomware.
I haven't even seen a single company that were able to present a whitepaper with a case with a tangible benefit over existing systems. "Oh it's decentralized and trustless etc". But in any case I've seen, if you sit down and write up the trust model for that system, and who you need to trust no matter what, and compare what you have with a classical approach over a blockchain approach, the claimed benefits don't standup to scrutinity.
Very little actual transactions, often on the order of 1 tx/sec which can hardly be called production but rather something expected of experimental/PoC-grade loads, if even that.
With so many years of unfulfilled promises, when are we allowed to conclude it's a failure? It's proponents will say "Oh there's an amazing value, just wait and see!" like the weavers in the Emperor's New Clothes. But when is it coming? Why hasn't it already happened, since the idea is hardly new and anyone who could spell "c-r-y-p-t-o" would be up to their neck in venture funding.
To me it seems like just an eternal cycle of doubling down on funding and promises, but without ever delivering anything. Basically just saying the same thing over and over and hoping someone will think it's "new".
Maybe it can go on forever, especially when the fiat systems are printing money like crazy! Those money have to go somewhere, and some of it is going to funding crypto companies.
Re:When is it coming? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It will collapse when people need their money. So far the economy is going like a freight train, that might not last forever. The projected consumer savings will start to dissipate next summer, then watch out. Crypto is like mining stocks/penny stocks. They have a few hype peaks which are based on speculation, then it settles on the true value of the stock. This process takes years, I think the same thing will happen to crypto. There is no way people are going to use 200 different coins to move money around
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I have seen two actual real-world use-cases where blockchain technology MIGHT make sense.
One is the record of land ownership - land and title registers - because right now they are centralized with the government and having them decentralized, public and traceable is a nice thing. Not nice enough that I think it'll replace a working system, but at least the case can be made.
The other is shipping records. Various entities involved, not all entirely trusting each other, etc. - protection against forgery and o
For what? (Score:2)
Tech Execs and Engineers Are Quitting ... For 'Once-in-Generation' Opportunity With Crypto
Quitting for what? Working in/with crypto (currencies) and owning them are two completely different things. Sure LOTS of people are trying to get rich quick by owning Bitcoin (etc), but it only has any (perceived) value because it's in limited supply and tightly controlled but the value isn't guaranteed / backed by anyone, like fiat currencies are, so it's basically like owning stocks except with no tangible assets behind it. Working in/with crypto is just another job, albeit in an emerging field, of de
Re: For what? (Score:2)
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It's basically day trading a commodity that has no intrinsic or real-world value.
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no one needs
Until you start thinking thoughts your government doesn't approve of, and then you find that credit cards, paypal, patreon, gofundme, etc cut you [washingtontimes.com]
Or...you could beat them to the punch and remove the ability of the US government to cut you from the global financial system the next time the other political tribe gets into power
Little late no? (Score:1)
Obviously no good engineers are leaving (Score:3)
Because that "crypto" nonsense is just that: nonsense. A good engineer can see that.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Obviously no good engineers are leaving (Score:2)
It's a part of every scam's lifecycle: once the profit dries up (or just becomes less profitable for the effort than comparable honest work), package up the scam and sell it as a service to other would-be scammers.
So you get people who spam spamming services, people who sell "leads" to tech support or advance fee fraud scams, self-help "success guys" who rent expensive things to take pictures of on social media etc. Never ever, assume that there is a readonable economy at the bottom of scams.
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What is the killer app? (Score:1)
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Because if you stay on the old system, you may find that the WEF/global central banks has decided to 'reset' you and your currency has been inflated to the point of being worthless.
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That is funny to read, given how wildly does cryptobazinga fluctuate.
This crypto madness (Score:2)
is worse than the plague, wasting electricity and talent to support gambling and crime
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Technically, you could say the same thing about the Fed's physical money printing presses. They are a waste of resources that support gambling and crime.
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However, unlike crypto, normal currencies have uses way beyond gambling and crime.
Define 'irony' (Score:2)
Far too little, far too late. (Score:2)
Think theyâ(TM)re dumb? They know something y (Score:2)
Eat Their Own Dog Food (Score:2)
We need to change the meaning. (Score:2)
Ah well, my colon feels full. I think I'll go take a crypto.
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I thought Crypto was an alien that came down to kill all humans. :-)
It's about business, not technology (Score:4, Insightful)
The growing ranks of true believers say crypto can change the world by creating a more decentralized internet that is not controlled by a handful of companies.
The web is already decentralized. It was designed that way from the very beginning. Anyone in the world can make a website and anyone in the world can access it.
The ecosystem built on top of the web has become centralized for business reasons, not technological ones. Companies poured resources into creating centralized services because that's how they could make money. We could just as easily have decentralized social networks like Mastodon as centralized ones like Facebook, but no one has a profit motive to make that happen.
These people are trying to use technology to fix a problem that isn't about technology. That rarely works.
Watching too much Techlead & Million Token (Score:2)
Watching too much Techlead & Million Token will lead to this type of irrational thinking.
https://www.youtube.com/result... [youtube.com]
Crypto is going to soon fall like a house of cards and hopefully video card prices can get back to normal.
An NFT is nothing more than a worthless receipt letting everyone know you bought something, but they can still have an exact copy.
Crazy times.
This means what...? (Score:2)
Funny how no one ever says "This is going to be the next Dutch Tulips, World Com, Bear Sterns, Enron, etc."
The fact that a whole bunch of people are trying to get into something does not indicate it is the future. It indicates it is HOT.
Hot things always do well for a while, but many of them go to zero. The earlier you get into something the higher potential gain, but the higher potential loss.
Crypto is not new. Getting into it now is getting into it late. Could you get wealthy, definitely. Or you c
Cold Fusion (Score:2)
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It is currently on its year 2021 release and has a 0.3% marketshare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
dotcom boom (Score:2)
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I remember in the mid ~ late '90's when all of my friends were liquidating their 401K's and throwing their hard earned retirement cash into dot.coms because the stocks were going crazy. They called it "field of cash" after the movie "Field of dreams", you know the quote "if you build it, they will come". Webvan, pets.com, heat.com to name a few. All were inflating off investor cash instead of cashflow; no underlying fundamentals.
And other companies who made real products were sunk by companies like Webvan. In the late 1990's I worked for Nortel Networks, and they sold billions of dollars of networking equipment to companies like these, on credit, and when when the bubble burst Nortel went down the drain with them.
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This is horrible (Score:1)
We're gonna fry the planet with all the energy we're burning up with this scam. We can only dissipate so much heat
Pyramid scheme (Score:3)
All of this is really no different than any other pyramid scheme. The people who get in on one at the ground floor make big money from it, as everyone else does the "me too" thing and joins in. But ultimately, it becomes a worse deal for every subsequent person and people who get in too late just lose money on it.
The thing I've seen with crypto is that since it's simply software? Anyone can spin up a new one at any time. And an existing (whether new or old) cryptocurrency that few paid any attention to is ripe to pump up as the next big thing, in an attempt to build the next "pyramid" of people buying in.
The "blockchain" concept itself seems to be in the same vein. There's a lot of hype around all of the theoretically useful functions you can perform using it. But beyond its original purpose, it doesn't seem like it's really added much value? (They've been trying, for example, to market it as a way to prove Wyoming cattle are really raised in Wyoming: https://beefchain.com/ [beefchain.com] -- but doesn't it occur to people that there's got to be less resource-intensive, simpler ways to do such a thing?)
Bubble (Score:2)
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>POP
This reminds me of the housing bubble. Guys coming in to work bragging about how the property they purchased last month had already increased in value by more than their annual salary... then one day they were suddenly underwater on 3-4 investment properties, and losing their family home because they took out a 2nd mortgage to use as the downpayment on the investment properties.
Scale? (Score:2)
Good, let them leave, better for the rest of us (Score:2)
Driven by NFTs? (Score:2)
Right, so this "brave new world", this "revolution", this "biggest thing since the internet" isn't driven by sharing data, sharing ideas, forming services around them.
No, it's driven by pure speculation - how much people are willing to pay for data created for that express purpose.
There is almost zero value in the entire market, other than the perception of it - a classic bubble. The speculation extends to futures to an extreme degree. For anyone around during the dotcom bubble, it has exactly the same bad
fleecing the idiots (Score:2)
Investors, too, have flooded in. They have poured more than $28 billion into global crypto and blockchain start-ups this year
Here's the real reason.
Managers aren't excited about tech. They are excited about MONEY. They want to get in on the bubble before it bursts and get their hands on a share of those billions.
"Follow the money" has always been good advise. It definitely is in this case. NFTs were a funny side-note until they started selling for insane money (and in this case, I mean that literally). Bitcoin was a cutey idea until the price went up. Now "blockchain" is a hype word that gets people - typically people who wouldn'