The former have all kinds of socially negative incentives; the latter is designed to maximize negative social and environmental outcomes as part of one of two explicitly reactionary worldviews (conspiratorial fiat/economic doomerism for PoW and neofeudalism for PoS).

The only approach to the grandparent poster’s “nemesis” all leads to contributing to the cryptocurrency ecosystem, as you can only improve some parts of the stack, as opposed to hoping the stack disappears. And a high probability of making a lot of money in the process.

It would be interesting to see numbers backing this up, as well as the claim that cryptocurrency developers are making more than SWEs on average.

Anecdotally, my friends and acquaintances (numbering a ~dozen or so) at cryptocurrencies are split about evenly between PoW and PoS. Nobody I know is working on alternatives, and this is consistent with the economic incentives: the money is all in PoW, and the engineers go where the money is.

Crypto Tech recruiters will give you some insight into what people are making. People that opt for employment are getting like $150k-$250k and token grants that can easily be worth a million dollars or more, vest in 3-6 months as opposed to 1-4 years. People that opt for self employment negotiate much larger percentages of the tokens or sales of tokens, and so it can be a lot more. There are many duds, and that doesn’t matter unless a separate higher standard was levied exclusively to crypto (which is common, and silly). Its much more de-risked than equity in the rest of tech. It competes with FAANG and surpasses for almost everyone that bothers to show up. If you can code.

In any case, there are a few people looking for and developing consensus-level alternatives. But proof of work and proof of stake is very simple and so a developer wouldn't be working on that finished aspect. They would be working on an alternative, or not at the consensus layer.

Getting paid in unregistered securities that I have to dump on some shady foreign exchange isn’t my definition of “derisked”.

People accepting this kind of payment for their services are hoping to cash out before the bubble pops and develop selective amnesia about their role in scamming retail investors with these boiler room tokens.

Its derisked because the shady foreign exchanges are removed from the equation, and the gamble for exit liquidity is removed from the idea of exchanges balking at SEC actions.

We are at the point now where liquidity doesn't disappear even if the SEC pokes at the project. Due to the nature of AMMs, liquidity can be automatically provided and locked on-chain and even burned - ensuring its availability permanently at some prices, so nobody could even compel an entity to take down liquidity, I’ve never seen a system like that before. This is an example of antifragility, and antifragility has value. This kind of systems increases its capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. Its an example of what people have been trying to say for a whole decade now.

Derisked doesnt mean absolved of risk. It means some of the risk is removed.

So, it also means it doesnt matter! Employees have no liability, only money, they don't even put up capital. Its the same circumstance as hopeful employees being convinced they're “changing the world” at tech startups and publicly traded tech companies, except more favorable for employees.

2. Money talks.

Yes it is, and I’m not trying to profit by illegally selling it to retail investors.

I’m not a lawyer, but it seems like a dangerous assumption that the SEC won’t care that you sold a million dollars’ worth of tokens that represent equity in your employer and were granted to you on that basis.

Sometimes the SEC sees overlapping securities laws involved, and then they do care, but its really just a problem for consumer protection agencies like the FTC, who doesn't care to regulate transactions. So securities purview is not inherent to the format of asset being exchanged, so there are some things to avoid and then you’re good to go.

I really find that todays trendy “muh energy use” detractors will wind up contributing to alternate consensus models for distributed ledgers

Which means its still more beneficial to have prior experience in this sector than simply hoping it goes away

The anecdotal claim is that all of the components up the "stack" are focused primarily on chains/substrates/ecosystems/whatever-you-want-to-call-thems that ultimately boil down to just PoS or PoW. Nobody is laboring under the delusion that their NIH cryptocurrency wallet is worth anything in any other context.

Many frontend only developers just plug in a library so that their client side users communicate to the nearest node and then make 6-7 figures or more. Thats so far abstracted away from consensus layer that I dont know what to say.

Edit: I guess the most important thing to say is that the frontend developer’s code would still work even if the consensus model was swapped to something else, or was an actual centralized database. I mean, they do test on localhost.

Why is cryptocurrency software development different, to you, then the rest of tech?

In the rest of the software industry, there is at least a plausible resemblance to traditional economic incentives: you build software that people pay for (or otherwise extracts value from them, like adtech). The "value" of the product, company, &c. is some function of the company's financial health, public speculation, and the expected size of the market.

It's difficult to say the same for DeFi: nearly all of the products seem to be in the "Uber for Dogs" category, except that the "Uber" is an extremely slow distributed ledger with no discernible benefits. The value appears to be solely in speculation, divorced from underlying technical value.

And here's the thing: the market can speculate all it wants. But the underlying economic reality is that cryptocurrencies aren't meaningfully competing with traditional alternatives, and the market is built on that: we see ridiculous valuations for "$SERVICE but on $COIN" not because `$SERVICE` is worth that much, but because speculators are riding the speculative wave of `$COIN` and using `$SERVICE` to pump that speculation.

So an unfalsifiable and impossible separate higher standard levied exclusively at crypto when it applies to teams and products in the rest of the tech industry.

It doesn't matter that you don't like the applications? This isnt different enough from the non crypto world to support what you’re writing.

There are other options. For example, I've spent the best years of my life on startups building things that are doing good in the world and trying to get them to scale. I haven't had any home runs, but I've helped get a faster acting anti-psychosis drug approved for people with severe schizophrenia, gotten a COVID vaccine approved faster, and now build tools for social workers that have gotten hundreds of people out of homelessness and helped people get out of housing that was making them sick. Despite not yet having a winning startup lottery ticket, that I've made a small positive difference in the world is enough for me, especially because I earn more than enough to have a comfortable life.

I’m glad you are finding something fulfilling.

Most crypto developers have causes that have nothing to do with intentionally believing nonsense for a limited time, or greed, or the environmental concerns over using a fraction of the energy that other industries do.

I'd argue that the fact that we got to the point where the options are what you described might be an indicative that they (we) were never the best and brightest in the first place.

Its more that other people say that about a very few select industries and trades, I've heard this many many times levied at the finance industry and the last two decades thats been specifically software engineers (the “quants”) at finance firms, software eating all