I discovered Blockchain in early 2022, where I was hooked by the cipher-punk culture and how much of human modern suffering is derived by the unfair financial system. I decided then to deepen my knowledge, and that led me to learn the basics of applied cryptography, systems programming with Rust, and eventually the Polkadot SDK.
This was a lot of fun, and full of big discoveries; the most important one was Systems Programming. I genuinely enjoyed the systems programming part and how my previous experience with programming using high level languages now seems like playing Lego!
I also must say that trust-less computing was truly illuminating for me, and how cryptography is leveraged programmatically to ditch trust entirely in favor of a model that gives the users true privacy and security.
That led me to do various open-source contributions, creating a handful of open-source projects and even engaging in the broder crypto community (attending the Polkadot Blockchain Academy).
However, I eventually realized that I was not too keen to continue. This is not a critique of Blockchain as a technology—I truly believe it is here to stay and that its major scalability and interoperability issues will eventually be resolved. It’s rather because; as of today the Blockchain technology is mostly used in cryptocurrency projects, and a lot of them are arguably hard scams. I can work in Blockchain based open-source projects all my life but it doesn’t pay the bills, and the vast majority of job opportunities I get are in the so called “Cryptocurrency trading startups”, structures that I truly doubt the core values and what problems they try to solve. That why I decided to pause my Blockchain development efforts entirely.
My intellectual curiosity was and still is in the Swift ecosystem. I just need to revive my mobile app development projects and invest more time on the indie side of it. No more cryptocurrency projects. We can be a privacy activist without touching the crypto world, to the contrary, I believe that privacy doesn’t have to be based on trustless protocols, Web2 can still be privacy focused while being based on trust.