"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." (Quote from computer pioneer Howard A

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." (Quote from computer pioneer Howard Aiken.) If something is truly new, and truly valuable, with an emphasis on "truly" for both parts,it will be different enough that the conventional wisdom will reject it, but it will win in the long tun. That's because it isn't obvious in the current context; if it was, someone would already be doing it. Because it's not obvious, when people are first exposed to it, their immediate instinct is that it is worthless because non-mainstream things usually are, and it's easier to reject all non-mainstream things then to delve deeply enough into each one to actually understand whether it has value or not. In fact, there just isn't enough time to do so, and because it means overriding deep, long-held assumptions, it can be extraordinarily difficult. It's the same in the tech business as it is in art. An anecdote from my personal experience: When, in the mid-90's web sites had to try to actively sell their advertising space in order to get ad revenues, which made it virtually impossible for small sites to get those revenues, I had the idea of ads being distributed through hubs and targetted by tracking people using what are now called "tracking cookies"[1]. I presented the idea to the guy who had been on the cover of Business 2.0 magazine and called the best VC around a few months before, and who was heavily invested in traditional advertising, he said: "I don't see how there's much money to be made here." (To be fair, Ollie Curme at Battery Ventures did get it when I showed it to him.) I think something similar is happening here on HN now with respect to a knee-jerk, snobby rejection of the potential of blockchain by people who have no idea what's being built or what it can enable, especially with respect to potential uses of zero-knowledge proofs in a blockchain context, but see the scams that have been happening which make it especially easy to feel safe in being rejecting. [1] https://www.garyrobinson.net/2021/07/did-i-invent-browser-cookies-for-advertising.html https://www.garyrobinson.net/2021/07/did-i-invent-browser-co...