Bitcoin and Blockchain Are Among the Fastest-Growing Skills Online (bloomberg.com)

As cryptocurrencies explode in popularity, employers are clamoring for workers with expertise in the emerging field. From a report: Demand for online freelancers who specialize in blockchain and bitcoin-related work surged last quarter, according to data compiled by Upwork, a website that connects freelancers with employers. The two skills were respectively the second and third fastest-growing skills on Upwork's platform. With the price of bitcoin having surged more than 500 percent this year, companies are rushing in to capitalize on the boom. Other skills in Upwork's list of fastest-growing skills include robotics (No. 1), as well as a cybersecurity specialty called penetration testing (No. 4) and a subfield in artificial intelligence called deep learning (No. 8).

Comments

Must have 10 year's experience

[omnichad]

This is a job for liars. Only the people who claim 10 years of experience will be hired.

Re:Must have 10 year's experience

[Darinbob]

I remember that too. Saw "5 years required", so I did a quick check and the only way someone had 5 years experience in Java is if they had been working at Sun 5 years prior.

However, this is just HR boilerplate. What happens if if the job is entry level they say "experience in Java", if the job is junior level they say "5 years experience in Java", if the job is senior level they say "10+ years of experience in Java". The actual hiring manager never asks for this. It ca be a real problem with the "nice to have" optional requirements because HR will start weeding out resumes that don't list any experience in that optional area. Ie, hiring manager wants a senior programmer in C and the job will peripherally involve networking and control systems, so HR rewrites this to require experience in networking and control systems rather than just listing this as "nice to have". Even worse when the developer job listing says "must know Jira", which is dumb since you don't want to filter someone out because of a tool that can be learned in a few hours.

Fancy accounting.

[0100010001010011]

In the olden days we called this a 'ledger'. Bitcoin itself, I bought some at $500 for fun, it could crash, it could go to the moon. I've cashed out break even.

Now the blockchain is where I'm excited for my line of work (embedded automotive/industrial/aerospace). Accountable, recorded, distributed tracking of who signed off on what calibration and when.

The current crop of tools AVL CRETA and Vector vCDM are traceability abominations. Digging into the underlying system it's just a terrible wrapper on a SQL database. A DB admin could go in and flip the "Violate Diesel Emissions" bit without having to go through the front end.

When Grandma's self driving car goes through the Farmers Market the NTSB is going to start tracking down exactly when and who made the brake force calibration. I absolutely hope there's a block chain that points out it wasn't my decision to change it but Bob in accounting.

Re:Fancy accounting.

[pr0nbot]

I've tried to formulate a rule of thumb for the situations in which blockchain might be the right answer, given that it seems hideously inefficient.

I think it boils down to:

* there is a transaction between two parties who don't trust eachother
* there is no mutually trusted third party who could manage the transaction ledger, or there is but the costs of such a third party exceed the costs of blockchain

In this case blockchain becomes the third party.

So for example in countries with strong institutions and rule of law, blockchain wouldn't at first blush make sense for a land registry (because a government agency performs that job) but in countries where there is endemic corruption the blockchain criteria are met.

I'm still unclear how disputes and corrections to the ledger would be managed in the absence of a trusted third party, though.

Re:Fancy accounting.

[Sarten-X]

I'd rephrase that a bit: Blockchains are appropriate where the effort required to corrupt the blockchain is significantly greater than the value to be gained by defrauding the other involved parties.

That's very similar to a basic axiom of game theory: Players will be honest when the perceived cost of cheating is higher than the perceived value to be gained by cheating.

In a private two-party system, a blockchain doesn't add anything, because either side can trivially rebuild the entire chain to fit their narrative. Publishing the chain brings in a trusted third party (a public record). In that case, the cost to cheat includes the cost to change the public record, which varies by implementation. In countries with endemic corruption, the cheating becomes simpler, because the trusted record-holder (say, a copy of the blockchain in a bank vault or published to a newspaper) can be changed for a certain fee (like bribing the bank officers or newspaper archivist). Even in a widely-published chain like BitCoin, the whole network can be adjusted by a quorum of nodes (though at great expense), and that in turn actually raises the value gained by cheating, because then it appears even more unreasonable to accuse someone (and all of the required accomplices) of the deception. When truth is determined by a simple majority, conspiracies become more appealing.

In comparing technologies, it is important to compare them equally. Attacks on blockchains are different from those in more traditional business models, so it is tempting to simply say "blockchain has none of these normal risks" and assume it is perfect. It makes a more reasonable comparison to ask "what is the cost to compromise this?" and compare the results of the analysis. That also allows a grounded discussion about whether the project in question actually warrants the increased complexity of having a blockchain, or if a more traditional system is still secure enough for the project's value.

My spam for the day

[PopeRatzo]

https://motherboard.vice.com/e...

"An index from cryptocurrency analyst Alex de Vries, aka Digiconomist, estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to "mine" more Bitcoins. That's about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year.

This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week. On a larger scale, De Vries' index shows that bitcoin miners worldwide could be using enough electricity to at any given time to power about 2.26 million American homes."