@ asyncmind
2025-01-25 03:04:45
In the dystopian wasteland of tech we call the "crypto space," where tokenomics is a euphemism for Ponzi schemes and the word “decentralized” is abused like a buzzword-shaped piñata, software engineers—real ones—struggle to survive. I’m not talking about the low-effort devs churning out Solidity copy-pasta for the next Insert-Adjective-Coin. No, I mean the overexperienced, underpaid, and utterly exhausted professionals who used to build things that mattered—systems that could scale, products that solved problems, applications that didn’t have to slap "on-chain" on their name to justify their existence.
Now? Honest conversations about software design, scalability, or—God forbid—ethics, are impossible. Why? Because the room is full of crypto zealots whose job descriptions boil down to "pump my bags or GTFO."
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Enter the Zealots: The New Pyramid Architects
Walk into any crypto meeting, and you’ll find the same characters. The "visionary" founder with a LinkedIn bio that could double as a scammer’s résumé. The "community manager" whose job is to slap rocket emojis on tweets about nothing. And the "blockchain developer" who doesn’t know the difference between O(n) and "Oh, nice, this whitepaper has pretty graphs."
Now, try having an honest discussion with this crowd.
You: "This app doesn’t need a blockchain. A SQL database would handle this faster, cheaper, and more securely."
Them: "Actually, by using our Layer 2 token, we're decentralizing freedom, empowering communities, and disrupting the financial matrix."
Translation: "Our tokenomics scheme will siphon liquidity from suckers while pretending to solve a non-existent problem."
If you dare to mention Bitcoin—real Bitcoin, not some Frankenstein monstrosity glued to a shitcoin L2—you’ll get branded a heretic. "But Bitcoin can’t do smart contracts!" they cry, as if adding complexity to simplicity is a virtue, not a design flaw.
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The Tokenomics Scam: Why Engineers Hate Their Lives
Here's the dirty secret: most crypto projects are not software projects. They’re marketing scams with some code sprinkled on top. The goal isn’t to build something robust or meaningful—it’s to create just enough technical smoke and mirrors to dupe investors into buying the token.
For a software engineer, it’s soul-crushing work. You’ll spend 80% of your time wrestling with poorly documented APIs on some vaporware blockchain, 15% explaining to your PM why "put it on-chain" is a stupid idea, and the remaining 5% wondering why you didn’t just go into carpentry instead.
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Bitcoin: The Elephant in the Room
Every real engineer knows that Bitcoin works. It’s simple. It’s secure. It’s elegant. But because it doesn’t have a flashy CEO or a billion-dollar marketing budget, the average crypto enthusiast treats it like a relic. "It’s too slow," they’ll say, without understanding why Proof-of-Work exists. "It’s too basic," they’ll argue, as if simplicity is a flaw and not the reason Bitcoin has remained unbroken for over a decade.
Meanwhile, these same zealots will praise the latest shitcoin L2 that "fixes" Bitcoin by adding layers of complexity that require endless token sales to function. Never mind that these systems are riddled with attack vectors. Never mind that the "innovation" usually amounts to reinventing centralized finance, only worse. It’s not about building better systems; it’s about spinning a better narrative.
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The Undervalued CTO: A Study in Pain
And where does that leave the senior engineer, the architect, the CTO who’s been around long enough to smell the bullshit from a mile away? Stuck in endless meetings where you’re forced to explain to the same wide-eyed MBAs why the laws of physics and computer science apply to blockchains, too. Worse, your paycheck is probably being paid in tokens that are only worth something if you can stomach shilling them to the next sucker.
The most depressing part? The zealots don’t even know they’re part of the scam. They’ve convinced themselves that they’re "building the future" when all they’re really building is a pyramid, one token sale at a time.
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A Modest Proposal: Burn It All Down
Here’s an idea: let’s strip crypto down to what works. Keep Bitcoin. Scrap everything else. Rebuild the internet of value on solid foundations, not speculative hype. Let engineers, not marketers, lead the way.
Until then, we’ll keep trudging along, writing code for projects we don’t believe in, pretending that decentralizing dog grooming or tokenizing air molecules is the next big thing. Because, let’s face it, in crypto, the only thing that scales reliably is bullshit.