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jongjongHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I've worked for some very successful crypto founders who became corrupt

… I've worked for some very successful crypto founders who became corrupt. I saw the change happening. The desire to improve things turned into self-sabotage. It was unlike any other company I ever worked for; nothing made sense. Yet I know for a fact that government regulators gave their approval. I witnessed the EU commission give grants to scam projects with nothing behind it, then these same founders got funding again and again after failed projects. It was all announced publicly though it took some time to understand that the projects were scams from the beginning... But like they got money from a government entity and they didn't build anything AT ALL. Then they got more funding on their next project... Weird right? Proof of Stake is actually highly efficient; it's basically a ledger with dynamic runtime replication ability. …

Original discussionI wasted years of my life in crypto1,004 source comments · at import
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spicyusernameHN

I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me. The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology and how dunning-krueger can happen to anyone. Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand. That being said, I'm sorry the author had to go through this experience, the road of life is often filled with unexpected twists and turns.

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EkarosHN

I never got the whole larger "crypto" economy. The number of meaningless alt coins. That come and go most of the time, build on zero any type but speculative value. Worse than any fiat. And then stable coins. Fancy IOUs of fiat. Which might or might not have actual assets backing them. Which you might or might not be able to redeem. Say if Russian government had a billion in whatever stable coin. Could they redeem them and get real dollars transferred to some account they own?

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KaiserProHN

> you should not speak about the utility of blockchain. But most of the engineering around blockchain was to improve throughput (ie off chain transactions) Its not like you can really do fractional reserve banking on the blockchain, well not practically. this means that you can't treat it like "money" ie the ever increasing supply of non-central bank controlled cash (ie your eurodollar, yen etc.) There is no utility in stablecoins. They are basically joint stock company, but without an income, or case law to help you when it goes pop. Of course they are popular because they have no regulation and can basically do what banks do, but without any of the oversight need for stability/fraud prevention. "we are going to act like an investment bank, and create money, oh no, not by securities, but by word of mouth, that word being pyramid."

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KellyCriterionHN

>> I witnessed the EU commission give grants to scam projects with nothing behind it, then these same founders got funding again and again after failed projects. << could you share some links here to these EU-supported projects?

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