Facebook's Novi wallet hits trouble as two top engineers depart(financefeeds.com)
financefeeds.com
Facebook's Novi wallet hits trouble as two top engineers depart
https://financefeeds.com/facebooks-novi-wallet-hits-trouble-as-two-top-engineers-depart/
108 comments
Don't let the loud moon boys who take all the attention in the crypto space deceive you. There's a ton of serious and incredible work going on that rarely gets the spotlight.
Plenty of scams and irrationality too of course.
Plenty of scams and irrationality too of course.
Could you give some examples of the incredible work you mention? I think Solana is pretty cool, and am looking to learn more about the space.
Read about Level 2 solutions like zk snarks. It's really fascinating stuff. I enjoy the podcast called "Zero Knowledge." The last one with Professor Alessandro Chiesa is really great, but that's not the best one for beginners for sure.
Alogrand has some pretty nice tech. It feels like a v2 - instead of being held together with tape and fencing wire it's a well engineered properly thought out solution.
Things like their on-chain language not being Turing complete so they can scale it better than the Ethereum disaster.
Things like their on-chain language not being Turing complete so they can scale it better than the Ethereum disaster.
I'll second looking into layer 2 projects.
Most of the new blockchains constantly being spun up are little more than schemes to make the founders rich. Even if the stacks are technically cleaner and nicer to work with, it's really hard to imagine any new blockchain bringing anything significant enough to the table to overcome network effects of established leaders. Specifically be wary of coins like Solana, Cardano, and maybe even Ethereum, which Gary Gensler of the SEC has indicated are probably all unregistered securities and he looks to be gearing up to come after them.
I'm in the bitcoin only, simple, rock solid foundation with complexity built in higher layers camp, so I'll mention a couple of interesting things going on.
The taproot softfork was recently approved by the network and will go live on mainnet next month. Read up here, https://blog.keys.casa/what-is-taproot-bitcoin-upgrade/.
The lightning network is starting to get some real momentum after years of development. People are using it in unexpected ways, like building an e2e encrypted chat network (https://sphinx.chat/) that piggybacks on the network, or the LNURL-auth protocol (https://xn--57h.bigsun.xyz/lnurl-auth.html) that allows websites to provide persistent user accounts that are authenticated with a user's lightning wallet and require no other personal information. There's recently been some proposals (e.g. https://github.com/JohnLaw2/btc-iids/blob/main/iids14.pdf) to do some magic to stuff a truly massive amount of scaling within the limited bitcoin blocksize.
Protocol changes needed for trustless drivechains/sidechains seems to be gaining traction, https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0300.mediawi.... The Rootstock sidechain will potentially bring the ethereum virtual machine to bitcoin as a sidechain.
I know Ethereum also has some interesting layer 2 work, but I'm not as familiar with what's happening since I don't personally buy into the fat, complex base layer approach, the much more centralized nature of the network and development, nor the planned transition to proof of stake.
Most of the new blockchains constantly being spun up are little more than schemes to make the founders rich. Even if the stacks are technically cleaner and nicer to work with, it's really hard to imagine any new blockchain bringing anything significant enough to the table to overcome network effects of established leaders. Specifically be wary of coins like Solana, Cardano, and maybe even Ethereum, which Gary Gensler of the SEC has indicated are probably all unregistered securities and he looks to be gearing up to come after them.
I'm in the bitcoin only, simple, rock solid foundation with complexity built in higher layers camp, so I'll mention a couple of interesting things going on.
The taproot softfork was recently approved by the network and will go live on mainnet next month. Read up here, https://blog.keys.casa/what-is-taproot-bitcoin-upgrade/.
The lightning network is starting to get some real momentum after years of development. People are using it in unexpected ways, like building an e2e encrypted chat network (https://sphinx.chat/) that piggybacks on the network, or the LNURL-auth protocol (https://xn--57h.bigsun.xyz/lnurl-auth.html) that allows websites to provide persistent user accounts that are authenticated with a user's lightning wallet and require no other personal information. There's recently been some proposals (e.g. https://github.com/JohnLaw2/btc-iids/blob/main/iids14.pdf) to do some magic to stuff a truly massive amount of scaling within the limited bitcoin blocksize.
Protocol changes needed for trustless drivechains/sidechains seems to be gaining traction, https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0300.mediawi.... The Rootstock sidechain will potentially bring the ethereum virtual machine to bitcoin as a sidechain.
I know Ethereum also has some interesting layer 2 work, but I'm not as familiar with what's happening since I don't personally buy into the fat, complex base layer approach, the much more centralized nature of the network and development, nor the planned transition to proof of stake.
I jumped head first into crypto about 18 months ago. You are right, there are a lot of earnest, passionate, and talented people in that space. It does feel like it's 1997 again.
crypto like coins? or something else?
Tried to soak in as much as possible ranging from buying/selling crypto, over mining, farming, and folding, and being an SPO for Cardano, to reading whitepapers and becoming a value-adding community member. I haven't tried yield farming yet.
I assume you mean crypo-coins, and not cryptography based on this comment.
Yes. Cryptography I only covered in uni, and while it's an interesting domain, its not for me.
I still refuse to own crypto because its still just a purely speculative investment but there are some insanely talented people working on it. Plenty of turing award winners working on crypto at Algorand for example. Maybe after the hype dies a bit, we will see some real value be generated OR maybe even very smart people can fool themselves into working on useless projects.
In addition, I think everyone holding PoW crypto is partly responsible for it's absurd waste of energy and the associated CO2 output. If the price goes up, it only gets worse. I won't use anything PoW again.
What is speculative about people earning money in exchange for labor and investing that in crypto? Crypto is currency not goods that they would need inherent value. It is not so much specilation but demand, supply and investor confidence. Stocks and forex are just ad much speculative. Tesla is not valued more than all other car makers because if inherent value but because of speculative value and investor confidence for example.
That is correct, I also don't own Tesla for that same reason.
Tell me about it.
Some of those students were absurdly talented.
I've never met a higher density of talented individuals in my life.
Some of those students were absurdly talented.
I've never met a higher density of talented individuals in my life.
Could you tell us more about him? What was his reputation?
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Kinda funny your last sentence, as personally for me, hearing an engineer say they don't believe in blockchain tech makes me devalue your opinion.
Hah, I'm the opposite.
Money is an economics and societal problem (it's about trust, isn't it, trust that pieces of paper with numbers on them are worth something), not a tech problem, so software engineering expertise alone isn't enough. IMO.
Money is an economics and societal problem (it's about trust, isn't it, trust that pieces of paper with numbers on them are worth something), not a tech problem, so software engineering expertise alone isn't enough. IMO.
We’ve endured a decade of speculation on how it would change everything and the most apparent use case today is digital baseball cards. Forgive me if I’m cynical about it.
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Is this the libra digital currency project? How many more rebrandings are we gonna get?
I guess this is the wallet for the currency (i.e. where you out Libra)
Yes, Novi (née Calibra) is a Diem (née Libra) wallet.
How do two engineers affect an entire company project?
I have no insider knowledge, but my guess is that nobody wants to work on this project. Best to avoid any project that might get you hauled in front of the senate, which has already happened to Libra.
Libra is a zombie project. It was effectively killed as of the July 2019 House and Senate hearings; it's just taken years to stop twitching.
A pile of Libra/Diem/Novi people have left. I think it's less fear of being hauled up in front of the Senate, and just being sick of spending their lives in development hell. Even the original instigator of Libra, Morgan Beller, left in late 2020.
The last attempt to get permission to do Diem was earlier this year, when they wanted to do a US dollar stablecoin with an actual bank (Silvergate) holding the backing. But a consumer stablecoin that's meant to serve as money in society was still too much to allow, particularly from Facebook. So Novi is now scouting around for other stablecoins to use in its wallet software.
This is assuming a significant number of users of Facebook-owned apps want to use Facebook for payments, which is unclear. Messenger Pay/Facebook Pay has existed since 2015 and still has negligible volume as a percentage of the FB userbase.
A pile of Libra/Diem/Novi people have left. I think it's less fear of being hauled up in front of the Senate, and just being sick of spending their lives in development hell. Even the original instigator of Libra, Morgan Beller, left in late 2020.
The last attempt to get permission to do Diem was earlier this year, when they wanted to do a US dollar stablecoin with an actual bank (Silvergate) holding the backing. But a consumer stablecoin that's meant to serve as money in society was still too much to allow, particularly from Facebook. So Novi is now scouting around for other stablecoins to use in its wallet software.
This is assuming a significant number of users of Facebook-owned apps want to use Facebook for payments, which is unclear. Messenger Pay/Facebook Pay has existed since 2015 and still has negligible volume as a percentage of the FB userbase.
Is some 2 years at Facebook developer going to end up in front of the senate?
Well, possible, I guess. It could be exciting!
Well, possible, I guess. It could be exciting!
Maybe not as "a 2-year developer" but if they make VP of Novi, then yeah, they'd better lawyer up.
Theoretically it’s possible! But unlikely, I’ll admit.
Hell, dude. That's hard to imagine. Maybe it's hard for them to recruit world leading experts on crypto, but Facebook still has a ton of top talent and a ton of hungry people willing to make a name for themselves within the company.
Sure but justifying working for Facebook or in crypto currencies to yourself takes enough cognitive dissonance, I can't imagine the lengths you have to got to to justify working on Facebook's crypto currency projects.
It's easy if you actually believe the libertarian crypto gospel like many do.
Or just believe that technology is inevitable, and you might as well be the one building it.
Or just believe that technology is inevitable, and you might as well be the one building it.
This mindset is not as abundant as the older days, as a lot of us developers are now becoming more "morally" aware of how our code affects society on international scales.
Yeah, but my point is not everyone thinks the same.
You might think that way, and consciousness about the greater effects of technology on the world are coming into focus, but there are still plenty of people who don't see it that way at all. Or they don't care so much and just want a paycheck.
It's harder to get young liberals in oil, finance and defense, yet those industries still have plenty of talented people working for them.
You might think that way, and consciousness about the greater effects of technology on the world are coming into focus, but there are still plenty of people who don't see it that way at all. Or they don't care so much and just want a paycheck.
It's harder to get young liberals in oil, finance and defense, yet those industries still have plenty of talented people working for them.
Crypto talent is scarce, for one. And the intersection of crypto developers who would work at Facebook is vanishingly small.
It's supposed to be the technology of the future that everyone uses. It's not supposed to be like direct methods in crystallography, which are understood by a dozen people, of which half are over 50 years old.
It's not like that by design. It's still very niche from a dev perspective, and constantly evolving with so many different protocols released on the regular (most are shit), but you still have to sift through it to stay in the "know".
By comparison, crypto really just isn't that useful or interesting. What will humanity learn from crypto.
Right but a bunch of nobodies on HN actively disparage the entire sector for whatever reason, which requires a pretty deep knowledge that the average REST slinger doesn’t possess, so the market is tight for competent devs let alone top-tier.
Yea, it's disparaged constantly for no good reason and if you know about crypto you are a God and everyone else is shit.
Could be somewhere in-between. There are very intelligent people focusing on the crypto, defi, decentralization and "metaverse" space. It's colloquially referred to as web3, but after "Web 2.0" people here have skepticism of such a term. Why would they be spending their time on this? Are they all just, as another poster said, "ideologically delusional and/or pathologically greedy"?
> for whatever reason
Gimme a break
Gimme a break
[deleted]
Privacy freak ∩ surveillance biz model
These things really aren't so far apart.
--> solve the problem
/
see a problem
\
--> exploit the problemLearn the tactics, techniques, and procedures employed by large corporate/state surveillance adversaries, identify gaps in their capabilities, secure your PERSONAL privacy based on your insider knowledge, anonymously distribute similar protection methods to the privacy-conscious, and get paid to do it? Sounds like a no-brainer to me...
Well this hits the nail on the head...
and also 2 years at a FAANG is normal and non-news
This article is a bit sensational / hyperbole, Morgan Beller, who's is mentioned as instrumental also left the team a while ago and it was still moving along, albeit slowed due to external pressures
They look like junior engineers from LinkedIn profiles. I don't think this matters to Facebook.
well if X10 engineers exist, and these two are them, it's like 20 engineers just left.
Or also if the project has 10 engineers, and the first is the lead who knows everything and the second one is the one who knows deeply about some real important dependency it could suck - losing 20% of your engineers on a project is bad enough, but the two most important ones comprising that 20% could derail a project.
Or also if the project has 10 engineers, and the first is the lead who knows everything and the second one is the one who knows deeply about some real important dependency it could suck - losing 20% of your engineers on a project is bad enough, but the two most important ones comprising that 20% could derail a project.
Crypto is the new COBOL.
[deleted]
At least COBOL in its time was a major breakthrough that resulted in immediate productivity improvements.
Crypto is more like a honeypot for the incompetent, ideologically delusional and/or pathologically greedy. (Which explains why certain FB executives are still running this doomed Libra/Diem/whatever project. They might do more harm somewhere else.)
Crypto is more like a honeypot for the incompetent, ideologically delusional and/or pathologically greedy. (Which explains why certain FB executives are still running this doomed Libra/Diem/whatever project. They might do more harm somewhere else.)
I'm not impressed with the crypto crowd. I've read too many "white papers" full of bullshit. In the newer rounds, most of the creativity is applied to escaping fraud charges. If the DAO controlled by the governance token controls the payments to the people behind the scheme, and they give up control of the governance token, then those people are just subcontractors of the DAO. So they're not responsible for fraud losses, right?
All you really need to secure a blockchain is a number of parties who are not likely to collude. The original idea was huge numbers of miners using spare CPU time. There's a famous picture of the top 5 Bitcoin mine owners in China, who together had well over 51% of the hash power, all on the same stage, talking about what they, as a group, intended to do. That was not the plan.
The "smart contract" system was botched. Smart contracts should have been something like decision tables, which can be checked exhaustively. But no, they had to put in a bytecode interpreter, become Turing complete, and dig themselves into an expensively bug-ridden hole.
Incidentally, I suspect that the SEC's hammer is about to come down on the "metaverse" NFT people. Back in 2018, the SEC brought the hammer down on the ICO people, by prosecuting the worst of the worst and sending the rest of them letters saying "please explain to them why this isn't a security offering". Suddenly most of the ICOs disappeared.
What we're seeing now are schemes where people are selling NFTs which represent virtual land in virtual worlds not yet built. I've seen three of those in the last week. That's a security offering under the Howey test. If you sell an NFT for something that already exists, that's one thing. If you use NFT sales to fund the creation of something, you're selling shares in a common enterprise run by someone else. That's a security.
This metaverse stuff irks me because I'm into virtual world technology, and the make-money-fast crowd is giving metaverses a bad name by not actually building good virtual worlds. (Go visit Decentraland, which, by the way, only has 200-300 concurrent users. It makes Facebook Horizon look good.) Or, in too many case, building anything at all beyond the money-collection NFT system.
All you really need to secure a blockchain is a number of parties who are not likely to collude. The original idea was huge numbers of miners using spare CPU time. There's a famous picture of the top 5 Bitcoin mine owners in China, who together had well over 51% of the hash power, all on the same stage, talking about what they, as a group, intended to do. That was not the plan.
The "smart contract" system was botched. Smart contracts should have been something like decision tables, which can be checked exhaustively. But no, they had to put in a bytecode interpreter, become Turing complete, and dig themselves into an expensively bug-ridden hole.
Incidentally, I suspect that the SEC's hammer is about to come down on the "metaverse" NFT people. Back in 2018, the SEC brought the hammer down on the ICO people, by prosecuting the worst of the worst and sending the rest of them letters saying "please explain to them why this isn't a security offering". Suddenly most of the ICOs disappeared.
What we're seeing now are schemes where people are selling NFTs which represent virtual land in virtual worlds not yet built. I've seen three of those in the last week. That's a security offering under the Howey test. If you sell an NFT for something that already exists, that's one thing. If you use NFT sales to fund the creation of something, you're selling shares in a common enterprise run by someone else. That's a security.
This metaverse stuff irks me because I'm into virtual world technology, and the make-money-fast crowd is giving metaverses a bad name by not actually building good virtual worlds. (Go visit Decentraland, which, by the way, only has 200-300 concurrent users. It makes Facebook Horizon look good.) Or, in too many case, building anything at all beyond the money-collection NFT system.
How on earth is this a take on HN, of all places? I have a feeling people with this opinion stopped paying attention in 2017.
Sad to hear.
A currency/wallet backed by a major tech company devoid of usual fatal flaws of crypto (PoW distributed blockchain, inflexible supply, slow, irreversible etc) would be most welcome.
I mean my private data is already passed around when I use Visa/MasterCard. I am already raped by forced conversion fees when using PayPal (basically additional 3% penalty for anyone not based in USA). The customer support and merchant protection is already non-existent with those options and security can only be described as a complete joke (the whole "carding industry" merchants are forced to pay for due to biased charge back process).
I trust Facebook to get those things much better. I think their track record on privacy is way better as well. I hope they can keep the project running and compete with dinosaurs of today payment processing/credit card industry.
I mean my private data is already passed around when I use Visa/MasterCard. I am already raped by forced conversion fees when using PayPal (basically additional 3% penalty for anyone not based in USA). The customer support and merchant protection is already non-existent with those options and security can only be described as a complete joke (the whole "carding industry" merchants are forced to pay for due to biased charge back process).
I trust Facebook to get those things much better. I think their track record on privacy is way better as well. I hope they can keep the project running and compete with dinosaurs of today payment processing/credit card industry.
How is Facebook’s privacy in even the broadest sense better then those of Mastercard and visa. They run experiments on entire groups, this list is longer than I can possible fit in this post. The biggest fear you can have for Mastercard and Visa is that they accidentally give away your private data for free to the world instead of selling it off to some data aggregators.
Looks like neither one was higher than L6 at Facebook. It's a loss but nothing the company will cry over and it'll barely impact anything
If two engineers leaving means that much trouble for a company the size of Facebook, the project was already in trouble.
It's not trouble for the company. It's trouble for the project.
It's probably more the signal than anything else. They sound like really talented engineers, but presumably Facebook has a lot of other really talented engineers. It's the signal of "top engineers are willing to walk away" being a proxy for bigger problems.
People aren't interchangable parts. They have specializations and deep domain knowledge.
Mythical man month
“Big companies should act more like startups!”
“Wait no, big companies should have redundant employees!”
“Wait no, big companies should have redundant employees!”
"Acting like a startup" means being hyper focused on a single use case with capital efficiency in mind. Proving, or disproving, the value of that use case. Then, based on information gathered in that process, repeat the cycle. It's about being efficient in the conversion of capital to value, not about how many people you put on the project.
[deleted]
> hires 50000 developers
> only two of them actually do any work
> only two of them actually do any work
Facebook is just getting scammed because they're the old senile pensioner excited that anyone is talking to them about how to stay hip.
Maybe they should partner with RobinHood :P
Now there's a coalition I can trust to secure my financial life!
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"One problem is that right now we can only retain evil crypto developers, due to our new platform stance which is pro-evil," said Eris Jùmen, head of media abuse at Facebook.
"These two were clearly non-evil developers, and frankly we are looking forward to returning to alignment with our core values of insularity, dark patterns, and subjective ethics."
"These two were clearly non-evil developers, and frankly we are looking forward to returning to alignment with our core values of insularity, dark patterns, and subjective ethics."
Please don't do this here.
I have seen satire in other comments here but have not noticed a similar request in those cases; could you clarify the difference? Thank you.
I think in this case it was just too generic - basically boo Facebook - and that moves discussion into a predictable pile-on rather than reacting to anything specific or interesting.
I'm not saying you owe $BigCo better, but rather that HN threads are good when they're specific and unpredictable, and bad when they're generic and predictable. Here are a couple of heuristics that I like to go by:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I'm not saying you owe $BigCo better, but rather that HN threads are good when they're specific and unpredictable, and bad when they're generic and predictable. Here are a couple of heuristics that I like to go by:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
"Facebook is committed to fostering an open and inclusive community, and that begins at our workspace. This is why we have a zero-tolerance policy for backbones, ethics or any other resemblence of a conscience. We truly live and breathe the utopia-building bullshit that is riddled in our media releases, and depend upon the talented engineers who readily prostitute their minds for the cause." added Mira Pedersen, VP of Human Relegations
"Earlier today," continues Pratiti Raychoudhury, Vice President, Head of Research "We provided Congress with the two full research decks that were the primary focus of the Wall Street Journal’s mischaracterization of internal Instagram research into teenagers and well-being." .... "Our internal research is part of our effort to minimize the bad on our platforms and maximize the good."
Mark Zuckerberg responded with multiple assertions that "Facebook truly means well" and "cares about you as a user."
He then whispered into Mr. Bigglesworth's ear: 'Those Dumb F***' as he dived back into his data-powered virtual reality where he is King, and far richer than Lord Bezos.
source?
The only thing I trust more than
crypto is crypto backed by Facebook
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN. Also, note the site guidelines that say "Don't be snarky." and "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28846699.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28846699.
It's like money, but decentralized. And controlled by Facebook. They'll have some sort of committee to help them pay lip service to social justice, and then promptly ignore their advice.
"decentralized" meaning ... your crypto may go through facebook.co.uk, or facebook.fr, or instagram.co.jp or facebook.com.au, instead of being centralized at facebook.com. much better security for peace of mind. ;)
But also probably not very decentralized.
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testifies before the Senate:
https://pkpioneer.blogspot.com/2021/10/facebook-whistleblowe...
The rank arrogance and stupidity of this project has me halfway convinced it’s a red herring.
Heck of a promotion for both, too. CTO and CISO of a16z's crypto efforts.
I almost wonder if FB might litigate to stop the move.
I almost wonder if FB might litigate to stop the move.
Can't.
One famous argument about why SV was special is that its because California judges utterly despise non-competes and non-competes-alike. I believe they're at least, in some form, unenforcable.
One famous argument about why SV was special is that its because California judges utterly despise non-competes and non-competes-alike. I believe they're at least, in some form, unenforcable.
They and Amazon could be sued (I'm not saying it's likely, or there is a case for it) for stealing trade secrets though.
In those States, they're illegal.
What about non-competes where the employer actually does pays-up to the former employer to prevent key people joining the competition, aka “gardening leave”? Common in fin, I hear - Normal severance in the US is a bit of a joke…
Which is why fin is in New York and New England
> Can't
> One famous argument about why SV was special is that its because California judges utterly despise non-competes and non-competes-alike. I believe they're at least, in some form, unenforcable.
They absolutely can; it just doesn't have to involve non-competes. It wouldn't surprise me if they trump up an accusation of IP theft, or more effectively, if they happen to hit the lottery and find an audit trail suggesting exfiltration of data prior to the departure.
I'm not saying they did this, but I am saying it wouldn't surprise me if Facebook tried to build a case around it, if only to slow a16z down a bit while Facebook recovers.
> One famous argument about why SV was special is that its because California judges utterly despise non-competes and non-competes-alike. I believe they're at least, in some form, unenforcable.
They absolutely can; it just doesn't have to involve non-competes. It wouldn't surprise me if they trump up an accusation of IP theft, or more effectively, if they happen to hit the lottery and find an audit trail suggesting exfiltration of data prior to the departure.
I'm not saying they did this, but I am saying it wouldn't surprise me if Facebook tried to build a case around it, if only to slow a16z down a bit while Facebook recovers.
You can't be accused of IP theft if no IP was actually developed during the time. This project sounds like a hot mess; who knows how far it actually got and what came of it.
Not exactly; it's simply that under California law, non-compete clauses are unenforceable in employment contracts.
The California Business and Professions Code section 16600 states that “every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void.”
What you're saying might be true about the personal opinion of judges; I have no knowledge of that either way. But the fact of the matter is that state law makes non-competes void in employment contracts.
That doesn't mean you can take your company's IP with you, however, as we've seen happen in other high-profile cases, like the engineer who went to Uber with a bunch of tech stolen from his previous self-driving car company: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/30/technology/uber-anthony-l... "Uber Fires Former Google Engineer at Heart of Self-Driving Dispute".
But general knowledge of cryptography and blockchain primitives is not that sort of IP, unless the company has some truly novel cryptographic construction, or the engineers in question are trying to take code with them – I'm sure they're smarter than that. Besides, blockchain code for one project wouldn't necessarily be useful for an entirely different project unless it was an almost exact duplicate. Lastly, for blockchains to succeed they likely need to be open source or at least shared-source; no one will trust a closed-source, single-party controlled blockchain. There's no point in using the technology that way: you might as well just have a ledger in a database. So any successful blockchain tech will end up being open source, and there would be strong indications of copying unless the people working on it make a massive effort to obfuscate and rewrite.
Let me put it a different way: if you had the source code for AWS's S3 or DynamoDB, they wouldn't be of any use to you. They're so complex and proprietary that if you wanted to form a company to offer competing services, you'd be better off and would get a product to market faster by building the functionality from the ground up (unless you could somehow take the entire team that has expertise with the existing software with you). The source would probably have value for bug-bounty hunters and blackhat hackers, but someone wanting to build similar services would be better off starting from scratch with the latest platforms (e.g. Rust) and programming/validation techniques.
Very specialized cutting-edge areas like self-driving cars and computer vision that have advanced algorithms and machine learning are exceptions. I think blockchain tech is well enough understood that it's past that stage, except perhaps for complex smart contracts, especially ones that involve multiple blockchains, and maybe advances to speed up network transaction speed.
I have no blockchain expertise whatsoever, but I'm pretty sure I could build a cryptocurrency from scratch from first principles given my existing knowledge of cryptographic primitives, and having skimmed Satoshi's original whitepaper and read casually on the topic. There's probably some fine-tuning magic in getting a few parameters right (like block size, difficulty, whether to be deflationary, etc.) but the basic structure of blockchain tech is pretty well understood by this point by people interested in the technology, even casually interested folks like myself. You submit a transaction for publication onto the blockchain and offer a fee for a miner to include it in their block. (How the network propagates these requests effectively peer-to-peer I'm not entirely sure, but I imagine that the wallet clients have hardcoded seed servers that they use to discover others for broadcast, after which candidate blocks move peer to peer across the network. There may be discovery techniques similar to other P2P networks.) So-called full nodes probably discover and maintain connections to a suite of other full nodes, which they use to broadcast transactions and candidate blocks across the network.
A miner successfully cracks the hash for the next block, based on the current difficulty level (set by time since last block), and includes all the pending transactions they know about that fit into the block (limited by block size). The pending transactions are cryptographically validated by their respective wallet public key signatures. You'll need to get that signature validation just right to make sure it's validating every input. Pending transactions include an operation code instructing what operation should be performed: transfer funds to another wallet, transfer funds to another wallet given N out of M signatures from other identities, and so on. More advanced blockchains than BTC have sophisticated programming models with many operations to make "smart contracts"possible involving multiple actors, but you don't need that complexity for a basic working network that can move blockchain currency. Bitcoin has basic operations and multi-signature transactions; Ethereum has a fully Turing-complete programming model, to enable its smart contracts and sophisticated constructs like the DAO. To prevent abuse and infinite loops you have to "pay" for the amount of computational power your transaction/contract uses based on its complexity, and also set a maximum number of operations it will perform before stopping (and you still have to pay for its execution if that happens).
If I was truly going to implement a cryptocurrency from scratch I'd probably start either with Satoshi's original code as a reference minimal implementation, and compare it with the current mainstream BTC clients (which have fixed bugs etc. since then). That's all open source, then adjust as necessary to meet your goals.
The California Business and Professions Code section 16600 states that “every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void.”
What you're saying might be true about the personal opinion of judges; I have no knowledge of that either way. But the fact of the matter is that state law makes non-competes void in employment contracts.
That doesn't mean you can take your company's IP with you, however, as we've seen happen in other high-profile cases, like the engineer who went to Uber with a bunch of tech stolen from his previous self-driving car company: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/30/technology/uber-anthony-l... "Uber Fires Former Google Engineer at Heart of Self-Driving Dispute".
But general knowledge of cryptography and blockchain primitives is not that sort of IP, unless the company has some truly novel cryptographic construction, or the engineers in question are trying to take code with them – I'm sure they're smarter than that. Besides, blockchain code for one project wouldn't necessarily be useful for an entirely different project unless it was an almost exact duplicate. Lastly, for blockchains to succeed they likely need to be open source or at least shared-source; no one will trust a closed-source, single-party controlled blockchain. There's no point in using the technology that way: you might as well just have a ledger in a database. So any successful blockchain tech will end up being open source, and there would be strong indications of copying unless the people working on it make a massive effort to obfuscate and rewrite.
Let me put it a different way: if you had the source code for AWS's S3 or DynamoDB, they wouldn't be of any use to you. They're so complex and proprietary that if you wanted to form a company to offer competing services, you'd be better off and would get a product to market faster by building the functionality from the ground up (unless you could somehow take the entire team that has expertise with the existing software with you). The source would probably have value for bug-bounty hunters and blackhat hackers, but someone wanting to build similar services would be better off starting from scratch with the latest platforms (e.g. Rust) and programming/validation techniques.
Very specialized cutting-edge areas like self-driving cars and computer vision that have advanced algorithms and machine learning are exceptions. I think blockchain tech is well enough understood that it's past that stage, except perhaps for complex smart contracts, especially ones that involve multiple blockchains, and maybe advances to speed up network transaction speed.
I have no blockchain expertise whatsoever, but I'm pretty sure I could build a cryptocurrency from scratch from first principles given my existing knowledge of cryptographic primitives, and having skimmed Satoshi's original whitepaper and read casually on the topic. There's probably some fine-tuning magic in getting a few parameters right (like block size, difficulty, whether to be deflationary, etc.) but the basic structure of blockchain tech is pretty well understood by this point by people interested in the technology, even casually interested folks like myself. You submit a transaction for publication onto the blockchain and offer a fee for a miner to include it in their block. (How the network propagates these requests effectively peer-to-peer I'm not entirely sure, but I imagine that the wallet clients have hardcoded seed servers that they use to discover others for broadcast, after which candidate blocks move peer to peer across the network. There may be discovery techniques similar to other P2P networks.) So-called full nodes probably discover and maintain connections to a suite of other full nodes, which they use to broadcast transactions and candidate blocks across the network.
A miner successfully cracks the hash for the next block, based on the current difficulty level (set by time since last block), and includes all the pending transactions they know about that fit into the block (limited by block size). The pending transactions are cryptographically validated by their respective wallet public key signatures. You'll need to get that signature validation just right to make sure it's validating every input. Pending transactions include an operation code instructing what operation should be performed: transfer funds to another wallet, transfer funds to another wallet given N out of M signatures from other identities, and so on. More advanced blockchains than BTC have sophisticated programming models with many operations to make "smart contracts"possible involving multiple actors, but you don't need that complexity for a basic working network that can move blockchain currency. Bitcoin has basic operations and multi-signature transactions; Ethereum has a fully Turing-complete programming model, to enable its smart contracts and sophisticated constructs like the DAO. To prevent abuse and infinite loops you have to "pay" for the amount of computational power your transaction/contract uses based on its complexity, and also set a maximum number of operations it will perform before stopping (and you still have to pay for its execution if that happens).
If I was truly going to implement a cryptocurrency from scratch I'd probably start either with Satoshi's original code as a reference minimal implementation, and compare it with the current mainstream BTC clients (which have fixed bugs etc. since then). That's all open source, then adjust as necessary to meet your goals.
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I got to know Riyaz more after we graduated and was impressed not just by his technical chops but also by how humble and grounded he is. I can't think of a better pick to serve as CTO, a role which requires not just technical acumen and mental agility, but also the ability to work with a wide variety of stakeholders.
I've always been bearish on crypto/blockchain but seeing Riyaz make the jump is making me think twice. A16Z made a great hire here.