Blockchain and the Insufferable Wannabe

About a month ago I posed the question “Why Aren’t More Women In Blockchain?” which the answer was essentially, because they don’t want to. The article of course is being constantly attacked for things it isn’t saying, and of course I’m called sexist for even writing it because that is what you do when you don’t have a cogent counterpoint, you use an “ist” word. My wife, two daughters and five sisters would likely dispute the sexist attack, but let’s summarize the article and move on. There is a total lack of tech talent in blockchain right now, I mean people that understand it at a very low level and can design and code it, I’m not talking just some Solidity programmer, I’m talking people who totally get it. No one is stopping anyone from getting in this space, they are desperate for talent, but you’ll have to mostly learn it on your own, so get started.

What is the Insufferable Wannabe? In the blockchain space, more than at any other time in my life, including the dot com boom, is an incredible imbalance between actual talent and the hangers on or wannabes. You can see it on various ICO’s where the “team” is filled with people whose bio has things like “serial entrepreneur” or “blockchain enthusiast”. Those terms refer to someone who runs after one shiny ball after another and has heard there is money in blockchain, so of course they are enthusiastic about it, but they don’t actually know how to implement anything or what even makes sense to implement.

While I was looking for blockchain marketing agencies, I ran across a few who spoke very highly of themselves and their successes, one had even dubbed herself ‘crypto queen’, no one called her that, but she called herself that. I asked them for their bitcointalk forum ID’s, I get a blank stare. I ask for their own website that markets their own services, ummm, not available yet (keep in mind, these people wanted $300,000 to start), so I ask about previous success stories, companies, amount raised, costs, etc. I’m told that is confidential. An ICO is confidential? All you do is check on Etherscan, so what we have here is a steaming pile of BS.

I saw a person on Linkedin asking for ICO’s that were only comprised of people that were not white men, and preferably spoke different native languages. Holy smokes, imagine if I was only looking for companies that had exclusively white men? Spoke different languages? Have you ever tried to design and develop a complex product where the tech team doesn’t share an excellent command of a common language? It’s a nightmare of unworking modules. In this person’s mind, there is no difference between white men across the planet, they all think the same and design the same. What an unbelievably ignorant position to take. This is someone who has set themselves up as a crypto writer, yet anything they have written about just illustrates someone trying to cash in on blockchain, they don’t know anything about it at any substantive level.

There are some other people that I’ve seen around town that tout how busy they are and amazing they are and try to get a bunch of people to put them on retainer for all their experience. My BS alarm went off in the first 2 minutes and then I’ve watched other people retain these folks and it turns out that all they really knew how to do was use a bunch of buzz words and phrases to sound like they know what they are doing. This is a problem with many of the blockchain conferences as well, you are either having an ICO pitch (which can be very interesting if it is a good idea) or someone talking in vague terms about blockchain and ICO’s.

These are the wannabes; They wannabe seen everywhere they can, they wannabe on your board, they wanna get a retainer for all the cotton candy verbiage they are going to sling around for you to stand in awe of and you are going to wannabe rid of them after you realize how they have sucked you dry and led you wrong.

Blockchain and the Insufferable Wannabe was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.