The Haskell Elephant in the Room

hi everybody this is charles hopkinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado so i was on the haskell reddit just a few hours ago and i noticed a piece written by a fairly well-known member of the haskell community who does yearly updates on the state of haskell and has worked in various different professions and then the financial industry and other places and the title of the article was the haskell elephant in the room and i'll probably post a link in this video if you guys are interested in it it was a very harsh critique of our industry and there was a basically the point of the article was to say that the association of haskell and cryptocurrencies is somehow bad or should introduce the degree of reluctance to the haskell community as if the money from my field is dirty or tainted and the point of what we do in our side the cryptocurrency side is to somehow borrow credibility from the haskell community he specifically calls out well type tweak and fpcomplete as if these are firms that have taken dirty money the core assumption is that cryptocurrencies are a ponzi scheme and this particular author apparently has emailed some members of my company telling them that they're participating in a ponzi scheme by working on cardano so obviously he's no friend to our ideas i will chalk this up to a failure of imagination and a fundamentally flawed understanding of where finance is at and how the the world financial system currently works rather than maliciousness or malice i remember years ago when i was in my early 20s i read a book from gh hardy called the mathematician's apology and hardy really enjoyed the fact that he was doing things that he considered to be useless in utility to society he took a very dim view of applied mathematics and a very rev a strong reverence to pure mathematics and yeah he took a special joy in that number theory at the time had really not been used for anything in the field of war of course this was shortly before we started using that field of science for cryptography amongst other things and the event of computers and obviously situations have changed since hardy's time but the reality is that some people fall in love with a field of study or an ecosystem and when someone starts using their ecosystem for certain applications if they happen to disagree with them then they feel the ecosystem has been tainted and this particular author is quite skilled quite knowledgeable in the domain of haskell and computer science and great but let's be very clear about something cardano is not a scam it's self-evident that it's not and our industry is not a scam yes icos have been somewhat problematic but in defense of icos with just a few billion dollars of capital raised an entire industry was created and currently there are hundreds of thousands of people using if not millions and tens of thousands of people working with and at cryptocurrency companies throughout our entire industry and a global conversation about the fundamental reinvention of money is underway how regulation should work how money should work how property rights should work how online voting should be done the nature of privacy and how much of it should we have how to build a different type of data economy instead of a surveillance economy in the technology our industry builds is at the forefront of that discussion that's not a scam that's not a ponzi scheme that's just a reality we have to decide how the world is going to work in the 21st century and either it will be decided for us by people we've never met in dark rooms and the consequence of those decisions will be hyper centralization of power and algorithms deciding your worth as a human being as we see with social credit and that's undeniably the case for now 1.2 billion people perhaps more soon and what our industry is about is to give people a different option where they're in control of their financial life they're in control of their ability to work with people in this article he referred to this as right-wing extremism i'm not sure why you can view giving people freedom to choose how their money works how their vote works how their property works is right-wing extremism but if you take that particular view perhaps you'll have a very negative impact or a negative view on our industry but i take great enbridge to claiming that people who have worked tirelessly to create open source technology patent-free ideas both on the academic spectrum and the applied spectrum are somehow taking tainted money for having the audacity to work on a project that ultimately seeks to give economic identity to billions of people there is no room for this level of discourse and if this is what he wants to do great you can build a little moat around himself and sail away and go live in a pristine pure world where no one ever does anything for some reason he doesn't seem to complain that firms like galwa for example take lots of money from the united states department of defense u.