Cryptocurrency
Broadly, cryptocurrency attempts a technical solution to a non-technical problem. Is fiscal policy really just a byzantine fault tolerance problem? No. Good leadership is obviously important, and we can't side-step that with de-centralization.
I'm really fascinated by a narrow slice of cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin + stablecoins), and the rest are straightforward ponzi schemes that should die in a fire. The "decentralized" myth behind every crypto project totally breaks down when the core teams need to rapidly iterate on their product. Given that every internet startup needs to rapidly iterate on their product, the blockchain is fundamentally the wrong tool for most of these companies.
Despite the noise, maybe the industry is net positive if it drives more attention & resources to the 0.00001% of projects that actually create better economic tools.
The optics issue is immense, because 99.99999% of crypto projects give the 0.000001% a bad name!
Projects
Coinbase
I worked there full-time for a couple years around 2022.
Helium
I ran 30+ Helium hotspots on my friends rooftops for a few years. It went really well for a while, but I no longer believe in the concept generally.
Staking
I ran nodes for a bunch of different proof-of-stake blockchains. I learned a lot about incentives and made a lot of money (almost). I now think it's all too complicated and generally not useful.
StakeRiver
I helped build a POKT staking pool, and at one point we had 40 dedicated machines in Hetzner (in Germany). We were running nodes for 10+ different blockchains and serving data in real-time to end users. It was fun to game the performance using web2 hacks (Cloudflare edge workers, etc...).
But, the price of POKT crashed, and I couldn't save it in time. Also, because of how the frontend was structured for developers, POKT had to censor OFAC uncompliant transactions... which is antithetical to the point of decentralized infra.
But, I did make this video.
...Overall, it's pretty obvious that the ability to rapidly update software is a good feature for most startups, and this decentralized-database concept only works if you get the rules exactly right on the first try (and nobody does).