I worked in blockchain 5 years trying to build good tech, and speculators ruin everything and don't care about good tech, but the real punch line is that
good tech is like 2% of a real answer
Here's a rant about a bunch of other layers of 'so you want to move money'
I worked in blockchain ("builder") for 5 years. I started 'eh, there are speculators, whatever, I build good tech' but finished 'holy crap speculators completely dominate and distort everything, nobody cares about good tech'
Yep. As much as I can see utility in some crypto, and there are some personalities in respect (e.g. Vitalik) by and large the sector in such a dumpster fire I'm not going anywhere near it. I've got some bitcoin in a Coinbase account, that's as close as I'm getting.
Indeed. For example: Chia is arguably decent tech (better than Bitcoin), built by Bram Cohen (of BitTorrent fame), innovative PoSpace+Time. But nobody cares, it's at #450 in market cap, way down below Doge (#10), $TRUMP (#72), Fartcoin (#144), Melania (#375).
The market cap obsession is part of the problem. Can I use it to buy things, easily? That's the only metric that should count if you're looking for practical use, not speculation.
A successful cryptocurrent probably has to start by first having a market that is dissatisfied with the available traditional currencies. If that market were to introduce on (with good tech), then it could immediately see the cryptocurrency used for its intended purpose. At that point, if it avoided the attention of speculators (not forever, just long enough for it to get its feet underneath itself) or could discourage those speculators somehow, what happens then?
Is there some other failure mode waiting, or does it take off?
It's hard to measure that directly. Market cap is a decent proxy, albeit inexact. If a coin has a market cap of $1.8 trillion, you know a lot of people are doing a lot of something with it, and it's likely that includes using it to buy and sell stuff to some extent. If it has a market cap of $200 million, then there just can't be many people buying and selling with it, and that means it's pretty likely to be difficult to use that way.
Nano is also another interesting one or litecoin etc., basically just having low gas fees I guess and being more efficient but I don't like shilling these products because I personally am a stauch believer in stablecoins and there are stablecoins like USDC's on chains like polygons which can satisfy the function "good enough" for me where they have trust etc. which I don't wish to replicate
There are still some 0 gas fees innovations happening in stablecoin marketplaces which is going to be interesting to see how that pans out.
Agreed re Chia, but here’s a counterpoint: MXE is 16,000 times faster than FHE, completely changes the concept of computing (that in order to calculate something you need to see the data) and it as a result Arcium the hottest thing in crypto right now.
The point i was trying to make was that the disillusionment faced by technologists possibly stemmed from a naivety about how the economy works and how people respond to incentives. Speculators are a "feature/bug" of pretty much any financial system. Stocks, real-estate, fiat-currencies, potatoes - The price of everything is being distorted by speculators. Done right, they bring liquidity, financial stability, and wealth creation. Left to their own devices, they cause volatility, inequity and financial destruction. (Crypto is probably more on the latter side on some of those metrics atm). The People looking to build a good crypto solution has to be clear-eyed about how to handle them.
I also wonder if the author has partly himself to blame. From his post, it looks like he worked for the seedier players in the space (because the pay was better) and is angry at the whole space. Its like a developer who worked for Oracle on MySql swearing off the entire open-source community.
edit: >nobody cares about good tech'
True. That's a big part of why you need [token-holders], "Build it and they will come" is more of a hope than a strategy.
Regarding "The Go compiler benchmarks appear to inconsistently show a very slight regression (0.5%)"
Let the golang developers "cook", I am pretty sure that they are going to do what would be right for the language.
"The Go compiler benchmarks appear to inconsistently show a very slight regression (0.5%). Given the magnitude and inconsistency of the regression, these benchmarks appear to be rather insensitive to this change. One hypothesis is that the occasional regression may be due to an out-of-date PGO profile, but remains to be investigated."
So they are going to be investigated and definitely a reason why this occurs and how to fix it would also come before you or I would use it in 1.26 (since they are saying it would most likely be shipped in 1.26)(If I remember correctly?) so there is no need to boo I guess.
I designed and named the Transaction Execution Approval Language for the Algorand blockchain in 2020. I'm partial to the original, but as it grew it got rebranded to be the "Algorand Virtual Machine". Glad someone still remembers it as TEAL!
I built a 'slice of function pointers' bytecode interpreter in Go in 2019 for the Algorand VM (Blockchain smart contract stuff) and before that the same pattern in C for a toy JVM around 2005.
It's a good pattern!
The Algorand VM was focused on low overhead running thousands of tiny programs per second. Version 1 had no loops and a 1000 instruction limit.
The JVM was focused on low memory, towards possible embedded microcontroller use.
So, 'array of function pointers' is nothing new, but it is a good pattern.
I think the 'law of large numbers' says that it's very unlikely for you to follow 4k and have _none_ of them posting. You could artificially construct a counter-example by finding 4k open but silent accounts, but that's silly.
The other workaround is: follow everyone. Write some code to get what you want out of the jetstream event feed. https://docs.bsky.app/blog/jetstream
95% of end users don't care; but Bluesky has the right bits built in anyway. There's a grand central aggregator of all 13 million accounts, but it's not _special_, someone else could run one (several hobbiests are processing this level of data). Migration works* (and works better than Mastodon, all your history and network move even better than a masto server move) (*okay, it's a weird command line tool at the moment, but as soon as someone cares that'll get cleaned up). You can run your own Personal Data Server and hook it in to the bsky network and then everyone can see your posts and interact with them. It's newer, only a couple years old, but all the right parts are headed in the right direction.
atproto PDSes are like blog servers with RSS (but better) and bsky.app is the prevailing RSS reader. It's an open protocol because anyone can host a source and anyone can run a different reader.
good tech is like 2% of a real answer
Here's a rant about a bunch of other layers of 'so you want to move money'
https://voidfox.com/blog/payment_processor_fun_2025_making_y...
and different parts of the blockchain ecosystem are working on some parts of that, and all together they're still a long ways off