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Comment by iskander | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, people chasing the dream of crypto scalability have actually invented a remarkable amount of math and tooling around large scale proof construction, summarization and validation. The Zero Knowledge proof ecosystem (and its relatives in multi-party computation and fully homomorphic encryption) might be the only useful thing that is left after the current incarnation of crypto fully implodes.

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And yet their fundamental lack of functional economic theory means that all of that is currently being completely wasted on crypto projects that's often little more then window dressing for what is basically very unimaginative financial scams.

There is probably scenario's where a temporary blockchain can solve some synchronization issues but the idea that a single static blockchain will replace traditional dynamic structures for organizing the economy is basically not viable.

I think you'll see the ZK stuff used increasingly for non-financial applications, it's a legitimately novel and powerful area of mathematical primitives for verifiable computation. FHE is also very cool and just starting to be usable for privacy preserving ML.

> might be the only useful thing that is left

That's a good point. If nothing else, the stupid money caused more practical exploration of ZKP and other exotic math constructs than we'd seen in decades previously.

I'd like to see more "toy" exploration of this stuff as the money drains out. That's where interesting things are going to come from, for a while. Time for a zero-knowledge app to select lunch destinations, a dating matcher that doesn't leak before the reveal, secret agent spy communicators for kids...

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