Different cryptocurrency products offer different properties and guarantees. Much like different databases offer different concurrency models. Folks that use currency backed stablecoins do not care for the trustless properties. There are various algorithmic stablecoins out there that you can use to stay free of KYC/AML but they aren't very popular.

Largely the folks that want trustless currency use chains like BTC, BCH, XMR, or ZEC.

BTC isn't a programmable chain. As yieldcrv says, your talking points are too old to make sense anymore. BTC's big "innovation" has been its version of an L2: the Lightning Network. Otherwise BTC people mostly treat it as a gold-like asset at this point.

Yes if you start doing analysis on DeFi and a lot of cryptocurrency markets, you can see very quickly that retail investors ("dumb money") are just providing liquidity to the smart money. There's a lot of unsophisticated money in these markets which makes it pretty fun to compete as someone trying to be smart.

It's even more brutal in the more established, traditional markets though. Obviously if you're going long and managing a portfolio that's a different perspective, but it's very hard as an outsider to compete with the smart funds in the world. You might be smart but most of those funds are very smart, well capitalized, and have a very deep understanding of market structure.

I was an early employee at a unicorn and I saw this culture take hold once we started hiring from Big Tech talent pools and offering Big Tech comp packages, though before AI hype took off. There's a crazy lack of agency that kicks in for Big Tech folks that's really hard to explain. This feeling that each engineer is this mercenary trying really hard to not get screwed by the internal system.

Most of it is because there's little that ties actual output to organizational outcomes. AI mandates after all are just a way to bluntly for e engineers to use AI, where if you were at a startup or smaller company you would probably organically find how much an LLM helps you where. It may not even help your actual work even if it helps your coworkers. That market feedback is sorely missing from the Big Techs and so hamfisted engineering mandates have to do in order to for e engineers to become more efficient.

In these cases I always try to remind friends that you can always leave a Big Tech. The thing is, from what I can tell, a lot of these folks have developed lifestyle inflation from working in Big Tech and some of their anger comes from feeling trapped in their Big Tech role due to this. While I understand, I'm not particularly sympathetic to this viewpoint. At the end of the day your lifestyle is in your hands.

This is my fear. It's one thing to lose a major sponsor. It's another to get cut due to a focus on profitability later down the line.

> They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation.

Did they? I see a $7MM seed round in 2022. Now to be clear that's a great seed round and it looks like they had plenty of traction. But it's unclear to me how they were going to monetize enough to justify their $7MM investment. If they continued with the consultancy model, they would need to pay back investors from contracts they negotiate with other companies, but this is a fraught way to get early cashflow going.

Though if I'm not mistaken, Confluent did the same thing?

They had a second round that was $19m in late 2023. I don't doubt for a second that they had a long runway given the small team.

I don't like all of the decisions they made for the runtime, or some of the way they communicate over social media/company culture, but I do admire how well-run the operation seems to have been from the outside. They've done a lot with (relatively) little, which is refreshing in our industry. I don't doubt they had a long runway either.

Thanks I scrolled past that in the announcement page.

With more runway comes more investor expectations too though. Some of the concern with VC backed companies is whether the valuation remains worthwhile. $26mm in funding is plenty for 14 people, but again the question is whether they can justify their valuation.

Regardless happy for the Oven folks and Bun has been a great experience (especially for someone who got on the JS ecosystem quite late.) I'm curious what the structure of the acquisition deal was like.

I really don't understand why investors poured so much money into Bun, I guess they saw another potential Vercel play? An acquisition doesn't sound like a very good outcome for these investors, even by Anthropic, I would imagine

Good thing they got acquired by a company that also has a snowballs chance in hell of ever paying back their investment

I'm also curious if Anthropic was worried about the funding situation for Bun. The easiest way to allay any concerns about longevity is to just acquire them outright.

As you wrote earlier it's a culture war thing. Lobsters is very big about being on one side of the culture wars there and the American social justice side is anti-AI, so the culture on the site has adopted the same view.

Queer in your 20s in Seattle is the prime demographic for a lot of these online subcultures though. If that's your crowd but you dislike the very online mores I definitely feel for you. A lot of the rest of us have the luxury of having friends not in these bubbles.

I have a younger sibling who is in their 20s but not very online and only one or two of their friends are, even though they constantly use social media. I think queer groups tend to be a lot more line than others. Leaving Seattle will probably help too but much of the US is unfriendly to queer folks so there's probably only a handful of other places to go.