I wasted years of my life in crypto

Crypto helped me step up my cybersecurity skills forever, when someone was exploiting a race condition in my AI app, I only knew how to prompt AI to do atomic operations because of popular smart contract hacks.

I wish I got funded to make a Coinbase bitcoin wallet competitor or Dropbox competitor leveraging blockchain for storage.

Pivoting to AI has better unit economics and I have a handcrafted app architecture because of my crypto venture aspirations.

Doing nothing for years and trying to vibe code an equivalent AI app now wouldn’t be fun.

>Crypto helped me step up my cybersecurity skills forever, when someone was exploiting a race condition in my AI app, I only knew how to prompt AI to do atomic operations because of popular smart contract hacks.

What? Prompting AI is barely a skill, let alone a cybersecurity one.

> I wish I got funded to make a Coinbase bitcoin wallet competitor or Dropbox competitor leveraging blockchain for storage.

There's like 50000 of the former, and 1000 of the latter.

I didn’t know what atomic operations, important concept in cybersecurity until working with crypto and blockchain, prompting AI is a skill, there’s an obvious context engineering skill gap I possess. I built a desktop application in Rust in 2 weeks while the industry uses Electron. Try to clone my apps, with whatever model of the week, it wouldn’t be easy. Not all prompts are made equal.

I was one of the earliest React/React Native developers before the industry shifted to it. Early Tailwind and Node.js adopter as well.

My AI apps are nothing new either but I do have subscriptions because of how I engineered them. Majority of apps in the app store make $0. You can compare yourself to those, not me.

atomic operations are not a cybersecurity skill in particular, it's a generic programming concept that more often guards against bugs rather than attackers. Although it is the case that attackers often exploit bugs, it's more likely that you are just learning to program and don't know the difference between both.

Congrats on making money though.

Security is built out of generic programming concepts, rate limiting, input validation, authorization, encryption, etc.

When you apply these programming concepts like atomic operations to something that control moneys it becomes security engineering.

Atomicity is literally the foundation of preventing double spending in a financial system. If people can spend bitcoin twice the price crashes to $0. Understanding atomicity is very important for cybersecurity/integrity of the system.

With more programming experience you’ll understand the mapping of studying crypto smart contract vulnerabilities and applying lessons to a non-blockchain database.

Programmers like you make me never feel threaten that my apps would be cloned, too many gaps in knowledge of system design.

>Security is built out of generic programming concepts, rate limiting, input validation, authorization, encryption, etc.

With the exception of rate limiting, those are indeed security techniques.

The generic programming concepts, like Atomicity and rate limiting are generic because, although maybe relevant to security, they would exist even without malicious actors. Atomicity for example is used on disk and database writes to avoid ilegal states in the case of power outages or crashes. Rate limiting on the other hand would still exist without malicious actors, to distribute limited resources when demand exceeds supply. And it often is used in the context of paid apis with different pricings based on different limits.

So in essence some concepts strictly exist to protect against malicious actors, while others protect against random conditions or good faith actors.

>With more programming experience you’ll understand the mapping of studying crypto smart contract vulnerabilities and applying lessons to a non-blockchain database.

If I'm not mistaken you started learning about programming and security very recently (which is why you can't distinguish between the two) and mostly through chatgpt? Might pay off to be less cocky, or maybe it's a good strategy so that veterans correct you, either way, all the best.