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It's refreshing to see an article about "crypto" on the HN front page that's about cryptography, not cryptocurrency.

fmajid 3y ago
It's sad that my first reaction was "Monoculture? We need a crypto(currency) Zeroculture", and I had actually read the article when it first came out.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  My reaction was monocultures are easier to wipe out, so this was a good thing (reading "crypto" as cryptocurrency).
deleted 3y ago
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pavlov 3y ago
I wonder if there’s any cryptocurrency article from 2016 that would be worth reading today. Cryptocurrency content ages like milk. Some of the original papers are worth reading of course, but by 2016 the influencers and hype shills had thoroughly taken over. That was the era when Buterin was calling Ethereum “a global supercomputer” with a straight face.
- arrowsmith 3y ago
  This article from 2017 remains timeless: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...
- px43 3y ago
  I was thinking that one of the PoS papers might fit, but the Tendermint paper was 2014, and the Casper FFG paper was 2017. Do you think Groth16 counts? So named because it was written by Groth in 2016. Groth16 introduces the first really practical zero knowledge proving scheme. I'm pretty sure it's used by zcash as well as Filecoin, and projects like Tornado cash. It opened the floodgates on verifiable computation techniques that are used for everything from scaling to privacy. Every year there's a ton of braindead noise, obviously, but every year there are also fundamental breakthroughs that change how we compute. Actually, specifically because of Groth16, the "world computer" concept is becoming more and more possible every day. When you have verifiable computing, you shift the paradigm from every node on the network having to verify every state transition to any given state transition only needing to be verified by one machine somewhere in the world, once (which can be done in parallel with the proving of every other state transition). This means something like a blockchain network is now only limited in scale by how much compute you can throw at it, and as the algorithms get faster, and the compute gets better, we're seeing multiple orders of magnitude throughput increases every year. Things have been getting pretty wild in the cryptocurrency space for the past couple years, and the future looks insane. edit: For people interested in diving into WTF "verifiable computing" is, this is a really awesome project that does some cool stuff with it that I'm not affiliated with in any way : https://github.com/risc0/risc0 https://github.com/risc0/risc0
  - debarshri 3y ago
    Are you from 2021? Because in 2023 the landscape has literally been obliterated to say the least. P.S I think "global computer", "verifiable computation" are a make believe concept if you ask a computer scientist. Sounds good on paper and feel futuristic though.
    - n4ru 3y ago
      >he doesn't know
    - mhluongo 3y ago
      ZK cryptography is still relevant today, regardless of how you feel about cryptocurrencies. I don't think cryptographers believe it's a "make believe concept", at least not the ones I know.
    - SkyMarshal 3y ago
      Computer scientists don’t believe verifiable computation is make believe, it’s real and here now, and all of the ones working in cryptography or adjacent fields know it. It’s only the rest of the mainstream business world that hasn’t yet caught on to the value it can provide. There are numerous good ideas for using it in business contexts that aren’t being done yet. It’s mainly the cryptocurrency ecosystem that grokked its value first and have been rapidly deploying it into production.
      - 3np 3y ago
        First line: Sure. Second line: No way. Very little of the cryptocurrency ecosystem and industry actually do verifiable compute in any meaningful sense. A lot is API calls to third-party trusted services (who are probably doing that, yes).
        px43 3y ago
        Since October 2020, the entire future roadmap of Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency, has been heavily based on verifiable computation, in the form of rollups. https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-roadmap/4698 https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-r... In 2023 alone, maybe 5 or so fully functional proving systems for running verifiable compute in the Ethereum Virtual Machine have been launched, and are currently live and operational. It's still early days, and there's a lot more work that needs to be done to fulfill the vision, but progress is happening faster than anyone expected.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > Cryptocurrency content ages like milk. I'm kind of fond of cheese.
deleted 3y ago
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It's sad that my first reaction was "Monoculture? We need a crypto(currency) Zeroculture", and I had actually read the article when it first came out.

pfdietz 3y ago
My reaction was monocultures are easier to wipe out, so this was a good thing (reading "crypto" as cryptocurrency).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pavlov 3y ago

I wonder if there’s any cryptocurrency article from 2016 that would be worth reading today. Cryptocurrency content ages like milk. Some of the original papers are worth reading of course, but by 2016 the influencers and hype shills had thoroughly taken over. That was the era when Buterin was calling Ethereum “a global supercomputer” with a straight face.

arrowsmith 3y ago
This article from 2017 remains timeless: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...
px43 3y ago
I was thinking that one of the PoS papers might fit, but the Tendermint paper was 2014, and the Casper FFG paper was 2017. Do you think Groth16 counts? So named because it was written by Groth in 2016. Groth16 introduces the first really practical zero knowledge proving scheme. I'm pretty sure it's used by zcash as well as Filecoin, and projects like Tornado cash. It opened the floodgates on verifiable computation techniques that are used for everything from scaling to privacy. Every year there's a ton of braindead noise, obviously, but every year there are also fundamental breakthroughs that change how we compute. Actually, specifically because of Groth16, the "world computer" concept is becoming more and more possible every day. When you have verifiable computing, you shift the paradigm from every node on the network having to verify every state transition to any given state transition only needing to be verified by one machine somewhere in the world, once (which can be done in parallel with the proving of every other state transition). This means something like a blockchain network is now only limited in scale by how much compute you can throw at it, and as the algorithms get faster, and the compute gets better, we're seeing multiple orders of magnitude throughput increases every year. Things have been getting pretty wild in the cryptocurrency space for the past couple years, and the future looks insane. edit: For people interested in diving into WTF "verifiable computing" is, this is a really awesome project that does some cool stuff with it that I'm not affiliated with in any way : https://github.com/risc0/risc0 https://github.com/risc0/risc0
- debarshri 3y ago
  Are you from 2021? Because in 2023 the landscape has literally been obliterated to say the least. P.S I think "global computer", "verifiable computation" are a make believe concept if you ask a computer scientist. Sounds good on paper and feel futuristic though.
  - n4ru 3y ago
    >he doesn't know
  - mhluongo 3y ago
    ZK cryptography is still relevant today, regardless of how you feel about cryptocurrencies. I don't think cryptographers believe it's a "make believe concept", at least not the ones I know.
  - SkyMarshal 3y ago
    Computer scientists don’t believe verifiable computation is make believe, it’s real and here now, and all of the ones working in cryptography or adjacent fields know it. It’s only the rest of the mainstream business world that hasn’t yet caught on to the value it can provide. There are numerous good ideas for using it in business contexts that aren’t being done yet. It’s mainly the cryptocurrency ecosystem that grokked its value first and have been rapidly deploying it into production.
    - 3np 3y ago
      First line: Sure. Second line: No way. Very little of the cryptocurrency ecosystem and industry actually do verifiable compute in any meaningful sense. A lot is API calls to third-party trusted services (who are probably doing that, yes).
      - px43 3y ago
        Since October 2020, the entire future roadmap of Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency, has been heavily based on verifiable computation, in the form of rollups. https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-roadmap/4698 https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-r... In 2023 alone, maybe 5 or so fully functional proving systems for running verifiable compute in the Ethereum Virtual Machine have been launched, and are currently live and operational. It's still early days, and there's a lot more work that needs to be done to fulfill the vision, but progress is happening faster than anyone expected.
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> Cryptocurrency content ages like milk. I'm kind of fond of cheese.

deleted 3y ago

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