Haskell and cryptocurrencies

Many blog posts about Haskell often discuss the latest advances in our compiler, research in type systems and clever new ideas that make the Haskell language such a fun and inspiring tool. However, if you peel back the curtain on a lot of what we do as functional programmers you see the economic machinery that shapes everything we do and informs the problems we chose to spend our cycles on. While the last few years have seen enormous progress and excitement, there is an enormous elephant in the room that we’ve collectively chosen not to discuss.

New religious movements like the cryptocult provide a psychological and philosophical framework that provides sense-making for a world that seems hostile and out of their control. The crypto movement fits all the textbook criteria, it provides a mechanism for determining an in-crowd and an out-crowd (no-coiners vs bitcoiners). It gives a framework for assessing the virtue of other followers based on their faith (HODLing) in the cause. It offers simple answers to complex issues in economics and monetary policy. It gives a linguistic framework of “thought-terminating clichés” and acronyms to quell dissent.

It makes miraculous promises of wealth, not derived from effort but from faith. It presents an eschatological narrative of retributive justice about the end-times of the global financial system, in which the true believers will be reborn with a new life in an anarcho-capitalist utopia.

I have avoided names in this article because I genuinely want to believe many engineers mean well and can change course, however core Haskell companies such as Well-Typed, Tweag and FP Complete have been deeply complicit in building up this crypto industry for years now.

Source of quotes: Stephen Diehl ^[1]