IMO the most interesting problems in computer science are happening in crypto. Especially if you are interested in cryptography or distributed systems. Way more interesting than making some web app ‘scale’ with the same formula everyone uses
I have no interest in blockchain or adjacent tech because I don't see any technical challenges worth solving, so I'd be interested in learning if I was mistaken to come to that conclusion.
The technical challenges in crypto are much more interesting than that of a FANG company’s (i.e enterprise software and widgets)
- That people are only employed at FANG
- That outside of cryptocurrencies, people only work on enterprise software and widgets
- That blockchain has the only difficult distributed systems problems
- That cryptography is being advanced significantly by blockchain (I would like to see more on this if it's true. From a brief search only "zero-knowledge proofs" are brought up, and considering it's a deeply technical math area, just throwing more money at the problem won't necessitate any advancement)
But most of all, you just threw out buzzwords without giving any examples, which is a non-argument.
- How to implement robust p2p networking algorithms for sharding in a distributed system such as Ethereum (a very deep rabbit hole), as Ethereum is migrating to a "sharded" architecture
- How to solve the "data availability problem" https://github.com/ethereum/research/wiki/A-note-on-data-ava.... The current solution uses advanced cryptography known as KZG commitments https://dankradfeist.de/ethereum/2020/06/16/kate-polynomial-...
- How to solve the problem of "transaction frontrunning", in which miners have an asymmetric advantage in ordering transactions they put in blocks for their benefit, which can adversely affect users creating those transactions. This is a problem known as MEV (Miner Extractable Value) https://research.paradigm.xyz/MEV and there is some incredibly sophisticated work going into this problem. It is a deep engineering problem as well
I could go on and probably give you 20 other incredibly technical, challenging problems that are on the bleeding-edge of this technology. If you're interested, would be happy to chat more!