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Comment by lazzlazzlazz | Hacker News Reader

Crypto.

And no, I don't mean applying blockchain to everything, or internet money that just goes "up and to the right".

I mean the new applications of distributed systems research and cryptographic primitives that allow for highly composable, highly trustworthy, permissionless, autonomous machines.

MakerDAO, Arweave, the whole field of open finance (aka "DeFi"), and so many others collectively are very likely to change the fundamental assumptions we make when using software.

Here's a great talk regarding trustlessness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0rZcpfF5dU

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I think the people behind "trustlessness" should have chosen a better word. When people that are not familiar with crypto hear trustless, they can associate the solution with the common definition: "not worthy of trust; faithless; unreliable; false". I.e. the solution isn't reliable. I realize that the people behind it are trying to apply the world trustless to the problem they are solving, but that is definitely not clear from the quick soundbites people read.

source: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/trustless

Yeah I was thinking more "Provable".

Maybe 'trustification'? A novelish term for novel concepts around creating trust where it wouldn't otherwise be.

A very fair point.

Some people are calling it web3.

https://web3.foundation/about/

I suspect a lot of people have this on their mind but the whole money-grab brouhaha made it bad manners to mention in civilized society. Better for those who are nevertheless on the bandwagon I guess.

I do agree with you, though. I recently had to work with Uniswap and I am blown away by how simple yet convenient and powerful it is. Not possible pre-blockchain at all. I think the mistake that people are making is thinking that blockchain is trying to replace some current relationships, and unsuccessfully, yet with these Ethereum projects it seems like completely novel systems are emerging that were not possible before blockchain.

Up until an average person stops treating crypto as a magical get-rich-quick possibility, I would rather suggest to stay away from it. Currently, even if you come up with something truly remarkable and solving an actual problem, many people will still treat it like yet another ponzicoin.

You're absolutely correct, and that's what makes it a great area of study.

It reminds of the article that was posted yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21315942) that said the biggest disruptors are the technologies that start out looking like toys. An HN commentor mentioned (which I now can't find) that what differentiates actual toys from big technologies that start out looking like toys is the fact that the fad never passes despite looking like a toy. Crypto has seemed like a toy with no practical applications since it's inception but for some reason it's still around. I wonder if that points to eventual significant growth for the field.

If someone can figure out how to do crypto without burning through thousands of CPU-hours of compute, they would have a real winner on their hands. Of course, execution is also a key factor in success. There are lots of good ideas that were had by multiple people, but only one successfully executed.

> If someone can figure out how to do crypto without burning through thousands of CPU-hours of compute...

I will freely admit that I'm only passingly familiar with many of the concepts of cryptocurrency, but - isn't that precisely the point? If coins are easy to mine, then they're valueless. I must be missing something...

There are other potential ways to make currency difficult to obtain without such significant energy usage.

It’s called Proof of Stake (as opposed to Proof of Work) and there are multiple implementations working already and Ethereum will migrate to PoS next year.

PoS is conceptually more complicated (block producing is assigned to nodes with staked currency and there are multiple validation techniques) but requires very little CPU power.

> do crypto without burning through thousands of CPU-hours of compute

Imagine how video games could grow if only somebody invented how to make games that doesn't burn through thousands of GPU-hours of compute.

This is definitely an area that will get more and more interesting and profitable. It's extremely complicated and "centralized" right now to get things to work with each other in a secure and reliable way. You need to dive into the arcana of authentication mechanisms each with their oddities or complex and difficult to debug subsystems like IAM. An understandable and debuggable solution would be very popular and profitable.

You can think of it like Trust as a Service (Taas).

That's a very, VERY good start. I'm stealing it. ;-) Y'all should do the same when explaining what this crypto-thing is — and stay away from even mentioning 'coins', stay on "BlockChain" as it is the enabling tech (call it "distributed database" to make it even simpler and non-buzzy); whereas applying it to currency is but one application among many (and possibly not the killer-app that BC needs to emerge in the mainstream).

Happy to see Arweave mentioned here, their dev community is super strong and they're doing a lot right from what I see.

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