Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam?
I work in crypto and have done for the last couple years. To be totally transparent, I worked on Cardano, then a couple random projects including a cosmos DEX and writing test suites for a qa consultancy, and now a startup DEX. I've been active in the scene (investing, reading papers, talking about crypto etc) since around 2016 and worked in it since 2019.<p>I think there's a few things here. I don't believe that many people are actively and knowingly working on deliberate scams, but there definitely are some. I do think a lot of people are working on trash and it's only sustainable as a business model because people are making speculative investments, such as Decentraland clothing brands (wtf?). I'm in the field because I like the technical challenges - I've been really lucky at working on some pretty hard/cool things with some really smart engineers. However I do find the constant onslaught from HN, news articles, random people on the internet and in real life, to be too much for my mental health and I'm considering leaving the industry to work on something else. Even if you're just trying to have fun working with a tech stack you enjoy (I've spent time in Haskell, Rust, Go, etc... most of the hip cool ones), being accused of being a scammer every 5 minutes is just very very draining. I still don't believe I have enabled any scams directly but I don't want to spend the next few years of my career justifying that either. In fact I just was talking to my wife about this before opening HN and seeing this question.<p>I think I need to take a few months off and start looking for something that's tangible like robotics, or something more visual. I'm just not in the position to do that right now. All the best to you anyway - I hope you can keep it all together better than I can!