I wasted years of my life in crypto

Okay, so if your time felt wasted, that must mean there were better uses of your 20s.

But, how else would you have driven towards your goal of building a new financial system?

What a great perspective. I hope the author reads & responds.

Indeed, working hard towards a goal is never a waste, it can often be a learning experience regardless of the end result. And that learning is extremely valuable and also takes time.

> Indeed, working hard towards a goal is never a waste, it can often be a learning experience regardless of the end result.

What if the end result is harmful to society?

By building a system that facilitates the economy rather than being inherently based around fraud and gambling. Crypto is not the only way to build a futuristic financial system.

Then you learn, adjust and try to avoid that in the future, ideally helping others from making the same mistake. Everyone makes mistakes, the scope/extent is slightly different for all of us, but everyone should have chance at redeeming themselves even if they did harm. Otherwise we'll run out of compassion very quickly.

> everyone should have chance at redeeming themselves even if they did harm.

You're changing the subject. Nobody is arguing that the author is irredeemable. On the contrary, the author seems to have recognized his own mistake and changed his course, at least to an extent. The question is whether the author's years in crypto were a waste, and I would say that it's indeed a waste to spend 8 years on something just to "learn" that one shouldn't have done that thing.

> Everyone makes mistakes

This is also changing the subject. Everyone does not spend 8 years in crypto.

I've made some big mistakes, and I think I've also wasted a lot of time. The wasted time was not "valuable" by learning that I wasted my time. It was simply regrettable.

On the other hand, I don't think I've ever spent a lot of time and effort on an activity that broadly harms society. I don't need to do that in order to learn that I shouldn't do that. Some things are just blatantly obvious in advance, or should be. You shouldn't need to dedicate your life to crypto to realize it's all a big casino.

It's not about "learning to not do that single thing" but learning from everything you picked up during that period, good or bad. And even if what you did had the net-effect of being negative to society, you can learn from the things you experienced during that time, meaning it wouldn't be a waste, at least in my mind.

> I don't think I've ever spent a lot of time and effort on an activity that broadly harms society

Me neither. I worked in the cryptocurrency industry, sold drugs, interacted with gangs, and a bunch of other stuff but none of them broadly harmed society, so seems we're more or less the same on that point.

But everyone's frame of reference and reality is difference, there is no absolute truth here, trying to paint it as such is actively doing a disservice to any sort of discourse we could have about the subject.

One could surely argue that making "paid browser extensions" somehow have a net negative impact on the world, and if that was proven, would that mean all the time you spent on those sort of projects were suddenly wasteful and you should have realized this up front? Seems inhumane if so.

> you can learn from the things you experienced during that time

Of course you can learn from your experience, and the author did learn from his experience, which is the entire point of the tweet, so the author doesn't need to be told that he can learn from his experience. He already knows!

Nonetheless, the author considers his time to have been a waste.

> meaning it wouldn't be a waste

This does not follow.

> I worked in the cryptocurrency industry, sold drugs, interacted with gangs, and a bunch of other stuff but none of them broadly harmed society

Ok...

> One could surely argue that making "paid browser extensions" somehow have a net negative impact on the world, and if that was proven, would that mean all the time you spent on those sort of projects were suddenly wasteful and you should have realized this up front?

If that was proven? Well, prove it. Go ahead, make my day. Otherwise, this is just a silly piece of sophistry with no applicability.

I guess that would depend on your own personal moral backbone as to which direction you would go at that point. Undoubtedly you’ll learn something either way, but hopefully someone would adjust for their next effort.

Probably by choosing a more realistic goal. Who even thinks they can build a "new financial system?" When governments already control, by law, the current one?

It was always a pipe dream.

They could have worked for Stripe/Ramp/Brex/Mercury for example. They'd still be rich but with non-speculative impact.

And Stripe ironically is making a blockchain itself to facilitate stablecoin settlements globally

So you're back to square one

Tempo may have more users than all other blockchains combined.