The two claims here ("it's an abstracted stack" and "DeFi engineers are collecting 6-7 figures") are fundamentally at odds: the latter can only be true if the economic (un?)reality of hype around PoW and PoS tokens can sufficiently goad investors/grifters/whoever into dumping money onto ideas that they would scoff at in a conventional setting.
The same goes for someone caring about TCP vs UDP, or perhaps a more fundamentally competing standard back then which doesnt exist now. If the software developer is not working on that, they're not working on it. The backbone layer functioning still has to provide confidence to investors so the developer can sell their app.
Why is cryptocurrency software development different, to you, then the rest of tech?
> 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.
The Uber for Dogs team is extracting value, all of their users pay to use it. That team is also not working on consensus models, they work on their app, no different than how an iphone app developer is not working on tcp improvements.
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.
