1/ Related: great engineers respect other great engineers. It’s like kindred spirits. It’s hard to BS your way into a circle of experienced & highly competent engineers.
2/ Cypherpunks write code. Cypherpunks let the code be the ultimate judge. They bicker on Twitter too, but easier to debunk shitty code than fuzzy subjective arguments.
3/ Find a couple of good engineers and ask them whose work they respect. That’s how you find good cryptocurrencies.
4/ You can look at how much rapport a cryptocurrency has with great engineers & use that as a signal for quality. Having great engineers is not enough to make a cryptocurrency succeed, but it’s the absolute minimum.
5/ Examples: Bitcoin has the greatest concentration of talented engineers (yet we still need more...). You can see it in the quality of their code, algorithms & how they go about making changes: review, testing & deployment processes.
6/ Most of them have lots of industry experience, having built & maintained large software systems that serve hundreds of millions or billions of people, over many decades.
7/ They understand the importance of Quality Control & sound architecture decisions- which is more arts than science, distilled from painful lessons over those working decades.
8/ Some architecture lessons in my personal experience: composition over inheritance; modular composition; programming to the interface not the implementation, etc. these cliche sounding words take real experience in working with large codebase to truly appreciate.
9/ It’s not impossible to have great design insights as 20-year-olds, but in practice I think it’s incredibly rare. Many things in software sound good on paper, but suck in practice.
10/ It’s important to recognize that the engineering team is *the* most important component of a cryptocurrency. Remember, we’re not building a consumer B2C app, we’re building lasting infrastructure software that will power other apps, and can last decades or more.
11/ Think Internet protocols, not Facebook. And pls don’t bring up Gates & Windows as an example because Windows’ lack of security is still the bane of our existence today. Decades of patches can’t fix the fact that you don’t have good security built in at the granular level.
12/ Proper lasting infrastructure level is hard. No one has perfect foresight, so it’s even more important to get the most competent engineers in the room & avoid paying that exponentially rising maintenance cost down the line.
13/ In crypto it’s actually a lot worse. Your worst case is not just rising costs but losing the value proposition altogether: your shitcoin fails to work at all.
14/ To conclude, it’s fine to have a team of businessmen, markerters, philosophers, professors etc. behind your cryptocurrency. But if you don’t have the engineers, you have nothing at all.
15/ *More analogies: Facebook can afford to miscount your likes & comments 0.001% of the time, but even that’s unacceptable in crypto. Think Mars Rover software, think nuclear reactor software.
