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It’s 12 year old tech that gets propped up as innovative every 2 months. I can understand his sentiment.

fastball 4y ago
A. 12 years old is relatively new for tech / computer science. There aren't that many novel / widely adopted computer science ideas introduced each year. B. This "merge" in particular utilizes innovations in computer science that were non-existent 12 years ago when the original Bitcoin whitepaper was published. C. There continues to be loads of cutting edge CS research that is broadly applicable to the entire industry but is being spear-headed by blockchain development, for example work on Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
- retcore 4y ago
  Proof of stake is a application not computer science. What fundamental new knowledge into computing are you thinking about attributing?
  - fastball 4y ago
    PoS is an application of what?
    - sterlind 4y ago
      to be really pedantic, I'd say PoS is an economic breakthrough rather than heavy-duty computer science, strictly speaking. the actual math of the consensus algorithms seems relatively simple, the challenge is aligning all the incentives so that adversaries in a group of anonymous people have nothing to gain by subverting the rules. I will gladly give a Turing award to whoever formally proves the safety and liveness of Gasper like Lamport did for Paxos.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    BLS signature aggregation was finalized as an IETF standard in 2019. It's the reason Ethereum can support over a million staking nodes. BLS was invented back in 2001, but was expensive to verify. A paper published in 2018 showed how to verify n aggregated signatures on the same message m with just 2 pairings instead of n+1. https://ethresear.ch/t/pragmatic-signature-aggregation-with-bls/2105 https://ethresear.ch/t/pragmatic-signature-aggregation-with-...
nwiswell 4y ago
You're entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts; proof of stake is not 12 years old (Sunny King and Scott Nadal, 2012), and certainly there have been a lot of other hard problems solved since then. There's a lot of other stuff beyond Ethereum, too. Privacy coins in particular look very little like what was envisioned in Satoshi's paper. Whether that's all worth anything from an economic perspective, I'm not sure (and even less sure whether it's worth what it's valued), but crypto is legitimately a bunch of very clever technological solutions to hard problems, invented by actual hackers, so I'm a little sad to see people minimizing it on Hacker News. Especially since this particular innovation is ameliorating the whole global warming problem, which is the prime criticism leveled at crypto. Take that away, and isn't it just open source software that we're talking about here?
- josh2600 4y ago
  This is the thing I don't get about HN. Crypto is one of the primary grounds for hacking right now. Not just hacking in the sense of writing code, but hacking in the sense of defining a system from scratch. Cryptocurrency is so quintessentially hacker that hackers have a "no true scotsman!" moment about its ascent. Similar feelings abounded with this thing called the Internet if you look in the archives. Edit: Yes, it's raw. Yes, it's messy. The beginning of every new era of protocols is always like this. Look in the history of computer science and tell me that the Internet's origin was materially more orderly than the chaos that is web3. It's always a mess until it becomes boring, and then we do the dance again.
  - desindol 4y ago
    It's a decade josh and it's still unusable for 80% of people on this planet. I was as excited as everyone was in 2012 but that plateu is just going on and on.
    - birracerveza 4y ago
      Since 2012 the situation has changed quite a bit. Adoption has increased massively. It's just doing it so slowly you aren't noticing it's happening. Not to mention the adoption possibly going on behind the scenes.
TimJRobinson 4y ago
Maybe if you turned your mind off 12 years ago. Fast Zero knowledge proofs only left the research labs a handful of years ago and are now being used to power layer 2s that deliver 10 - 1000x scalability improvements. DeFi is barely 2 years old. The consensus and scaling mechanisms being rolled out were only just created in the last few years (that's why Ethereum PoS took so long, thery were still making changes to the design as new research came out).

A. 12 years old is relatively new for tech / computer science. There aren't that many novel / widely adopted computer science ideas introduced each year. B. This "merge" in particular utilizes innovations in computer science that were non-existent 12 years ago when the original Bitcoin whitepaper was published. C. There continues to be loads of cutting edge CS research that is broadly applicable to the entire industry but is being spear-headed by blockchain development, for example work on Zero-Knowledge Proofs.

retcore 4y ago
Proof of stake is a application not computer science. What fundamental new knowledge into computing are you thinking about attributing?
- fastball 4y ago
  PoS is an application of what?
  - sterlind 4y ago
    to be really pedantic, I'd say PoS is an economic breakthrough rather than heavy-duty computer science, strictly speaking. the actual math of the consensus algorithms seems relatively simple, the challenge is aligning all the incentives so that adversaries in a group of anonymous people have nothing to gain by subverting the rules. I will gladly give a Turing award to whoever formally proves the safety and liveness of Gasper like Lamport did for Paxos.
- DennisP 4y ago
  BLS signature aggregation was finalized as an IETF standard in 2019. It's the reason Ethereum can support over a million staking nodes. BLS was invented back in 2001, but was expensive to verify. A paper published in 2018 showed how to verify n aggregated signatures on the same message m with just 2 pairings instead of n+1. https://ethresear.ch/t/pragmatic-signature-aggregation-with-bls/2105 https://ethresear.ch/t/pragmatic-signature-aggregation-with-...

nwiswell 4y ago

You're entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts; proof of stake is not 12 years old (Sunny King and Scott Nadal, 2012), and certainly there have been a lot of other hard problems solved since then. There's a lot of other stuff beyond Ethereum, too. Privacy coins in particular look very little like what was envisioned in Satoshi's paper. Whether that's all worth anything from an economic perspective, I'm not sure (and even less sure whether it's worth what it's valued), but crypto is legitimately a bunch of very clever technological solutions to hard problems, invented by actual hackers, so I'm a little sad to see people minimizing it on Hacker News. Especially since this particular innovation is ameliorating the whole global warming problem, which is the prime criticism leveled at crypto. Take that away, and isn't it just open source software that we're talking about here?

josh2600 4y ago
This is the thing I don't get about HN. Crypto is one of the primary grounds for hacking right now. Not just hacking in the sense of writing code, but hacking in the sense of defining a system from scratch. Cryptocurrency is so quintessentially hacker that hackers have a "no true scotsman!" moment about its ascent. Similar feelings abounded with this thing called the Internet if you look in the archives. Edit: Yes, it's raw. Yes, it's messy. The beginning of every new era of protocols is always like this. Look in the history of computer science and tell me that the Internet's origin was materially more orderly than the chaos that is web3. It's always a mess until it becomes boring, and then we do the dance again.
- desindol 4y ago
  It's a decade josh and it's still unusable for 80% of people on this planet. I was as excited as everyone was in 2012 but that plateu is just going on and on.
  - birracerveza 4y ago
    Since 2012 the situation has changed quite a bit. Adoption has increased massively. It's just doing it so slowly you aren't noticing it's happening. Not to mention the adoption possibly going on behind the scenes.

TimJRobinson 4y ago

Maybe if you turned your mind off 12 years ago. Fast Zero knowledge proofs only left the research labs a handful of years ago and are now being used to power layer 2s that deliver 10 - 1000x scalability improvements. DeFi is barely 2 years old. The consensus and scaling mechanisms being rolled out were only just created in the last few years (that's why Ethereum PoS took so long, thery were still making changes to the design as new research came out).