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Comment by some_furry | Hacker News Reader

I'm disappointed to see that none of the Crypto Fund II is slated for Cryptography, but instead only to Cryptocurrency.

Obligatory: http://www.cryptoisnotcryptocurrency.com

There's a lot of important problems in (and around) cryptography that need solving.

To be charitable: Maybe some of them can be solved by cryptocurrency projects? There is some precedent here. (Zcash advanced the state of the art for non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs and pairing-based cryptography, Monero demonstrated real-world ring signatures, etc.)

But more importantly: There are a lot of possible solutions that need an incentive to be developed, and could potentially become profitable start-ups.

But it's sad to see that cryptography (a.k.a. the real "crypto") isn't even a seat at the table calling itself "Crypto".

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There's a lot of important problems in (and around) cryptography that need solving.

So pick a problem, wrap a coin around it, and profit.

> and profit.

I see what you didn't do there :D

They forgot the important step of ‘sell coin to gullible idiots’, which is essential to the profits.

n.b. The ‘solve the underlying problem’ step is optional in all blockchain projects, and is generally omitted entirely.

Exactly. We can do incredible things with well-designed cryptographic protocols. Bitcoin is a great example, but it didn't open up some entire new field of innovation. The innovation has always been in cryptography.

The point of a venture fund is not to advance science.

I worded my comment weird originally, hopefully my meaning is clearer now.

This to me is a little like wondering why distributed consensus doesn't have a seat at the table in other venture funds; there's important work to be done in scaling databases, too! But venture funds fund businesses. If you come up with a business with social proof that there's a plausible (if remote) chance of 10xing based on an advance in cryptography, you'll stand a chance of getting it funded.

Just not by this fund, which has nothing to do with cryptography or, for that matter, virtually any normal business.

> This to me is a little like wondering why distributed consensus doesn't have a seat at the table in other venture funds;

It would be a little like that, if the funds were called "Distributed Consensus Fund II" (or some common abbreviation thereof).

> Just not by this fund, which has nothing to do with cryptography or, for that matter, virtually any normal business.

And thus, in my mind, it should be named appropriately. The current name is wrong.

If the entire argument boils down to "crypto means cryptography", then (1) it's not a very interesting argument and (2) it's pretty much already lost. In 2020, cryptography means cryptography.

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