LogFAQs > #969414679

dud posted...

Why did you get into a crypto company if you aren't a believer in it?

/story time

While working at a grocery store with no degree, my friends became rich with safemoon and started a company. I was into stocks and was into building my own trading bots for fun, just as an experiment and for fun with a little pipe dream.

I came up with all kinds of scrapers. I know all the tricks they use to derive public opinion, but the one I was into was deriving sentiment on stocks and analyzing if there was any correlation between the attitudes of traders and the movement of stocks. These traders were indexed as well, so any particular poster that was unusually good was picked up by the scanner.

I don't have many friends as I'd rather spend all my time programming projects, but in one discord channel my friend was in I posted my project. Someone was so impressed (my soon to be boss) that he wanted me on board with his new company.

My first task was to reverse engineer the ETH smart contracts involved for currency swaps. This was the most fun I've ever had programming, and I can't even begin to describe how difficult it was. I surpassed the compatibility of mainstream crawlers, by finding patterns analyzing chunks of hexadecimal. I cannot understate how hard this was, but I figured out every single contract I looked at.

The goal of this company was to make a 10% return every month investing. This was nonsense. No one can do that. I am frustrated and bewildered at this point, but I keep my mouth shut. Months go by and the only other employee gets fired for being downright useless. I am not let go, of course, I have promised no such thing. I can deliver software, not profits, so no amount of failure will be on my shoulders, and I refuse to speculate on any crypto purchases. When asked, I say to not buy, and I'm right every time.

At this point I decide to drop a bomb on them. I prove to them that the charts and patterns they use to trade are 100% random. There is no method to apply to the charts that could yield any results. And I have some great graphs I made that I might dig up, but they really are fascinating what I found. It all amounted to typical not-financial-advice crypto streamer chart-watching gibberish. Cup and handle. Death spiral. Breaking resistance. Witchcraft.

At this point, I insist that we need to create a product. If you're going to run a company you need a product. I also think we need to move away from crypto, and focus more on security, so that's what we do now. (without giving away too many details) I have developed a version of Bitwarden that's set to be superior in features and usability, all using local encryption. Sadly, the pit stain of crypto still exists on this product, and my boss's shitcoin fantasies. It supports crypto, which I gladly support, but it markets itself as a crypto product, which I'm not so happy about. It targeted a single small shitcoin community.

So yeah I could be a worse human being. I have more nonsense to touch on but I haven't, like being barked at for trying to share progress with our official Discord server, (which is now a ghost town), but that's not really objective. The dude is as dry and palatable to an audience as a propped-up politician, but insists he does all the PR.

I've done other things though. I made the mnemonic parsing library used by cryptos all over literally 10,000 times faster, using bitshift operations instead of the worst imaginable kind of "1" and "0" string manipulation.