From my understanding of cryptocurrency and the people in it, I don't have the premise that founding a billion dollar (or 10 billion dollar) cryptocurrency is laudable.
It strikes me that your comment would read by crypto fanbase as a success story, and yet as crypto detractors like myself as even further reason to regard them as terrible... you may have just invented the "completely unintentional if-by-whiskey argument[1]"
As a benefit to society? Not laudable IMO. But it does take hard work to swindle people into your crypto - that's the perspective I read OPs comment in.
Cryptocurrencies were innovating in one particular aspect, solving the double spending problem for truly anonymous transactions. Beyond that it's not as innovative as people think. Even Bitcoin supports smart contracts, and the only real noteworthy achievement in the real world Ethereum has achieved is becoming a massive platform for gamblers in the form of speculation, which makes up almost the entirety of Ethereum's activity. No name engineers at companies like Google deal with far more complex and far more practical problems as part of their job. I say this as someone who has written their own block chain from scratch (not a fork) and understands how incredibly niche and overblown cryptocurrencies are.
Just because you went through a “how to build a blockchain in 1 hour” YouTube tutorial doesn’t make you an expert on the topic anymore than someone who “built a Twitter clone in 1 hour” is an expert on distributed databases.
The idea that no name engineers at Google work on more interesting problems is laughable to me as someone who worked there for 3 years and saw the vast majority of them work on garbage Angular apps or borgcfg . Not exactly designing a zero knowledge roll up chain in complexity.
The “cryptocurrency=bad” bros on hacker news are getting so tiresome. Many people think things like adtech are scams yet if every single time someone brought up Google we derailed into that conversation it would rightfully get moderated but with crypto, dang is asleep at the wheel.
Actual cryptography experts like Dan Boneh and Silvio Macali are full time on cryptocurrency, but since your L4 Google buddy thinks it’s a scam, that settles it so we bring it up every damn time.
There’s cool cryptography going on in Ethereum, but it’s not helping economize anything useful. At some point you have to notice that all of the “cool new stuff” in Ethereum for the last 7 years all seems to disappear once greater fool liquidity has been exhausted.
Meanwhile adtech is making the internet awful, and thus stories increasingly show up about how bad Google has been getting as well.
I used to read all the white papers for all the new coins, and was definitely on the side of Ethereum as an interesting experiment when it released, but nothing has happened to make me think a premined securities play hasn’t turned out to be a scam.
I did not use any guides or tutorials, it was truly from scratch with some of the cryptography concepts borrowed from bitcoin, but with a completely different auth scheme for transactions designed specifically for business application. https://github.com/Salgat/FangChain
And not everyone at companies like Google are doing the same thing. Just because you didn't know them doesn't mean there wasn't brilliant work being done there, especially with regard to their scaling and machine learning. The folks at deep mind are doing far more brilliant and innovative work than Ethereum.
Well decentralisation is hard, it's particularly hard when it's dealing with real peoples money, it's hard to scale and hard to maintain, Ethereum is getting closer and closer day by day to moving to an alternative system called Proof of Stake, it's a different system from Proof of Work, you may be familiar with Bitcoin and its energy use.
You can read more about issues on Vitaliks website for example when Musk tried to become a blockchain expert overnight he looked a bit silly:
EVM based deterministic execution has proven to be a resilient model for smart contracts. The other major inventions are not Ethereum itself, but it led to, to name a few, PoS consensus and zero knowledge proofs which I particularly admired. It has grown into a huge ecosystem of practical cryptographic schemes. Ponzi schemes are possible with just Bitcoin, and yeah Ethereum is full of crypto ponzis at the moment, but all these useful cryptographic inventions may not have been made practical without Ethereum.
It strikes me that your comment would read by crypto fanbase as a success story, and yet as crypto detractors like myself as even further reason to regard them as terrible... you may have just invented the "completely unintentional if-by-whiskey argument[1]"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey