Hacker News Reader

Comment by iskander | Hacker News Reader

I think you'll see people picking those techniques and using them in a hidden-from-the-user way (like how git and BlueSky use Merkle trees)

View on HN

Cryptocurrencies have not actually invented much new technology, they mostly combined existing ideas in new ways. Merkel trees, for example, are an almost 50 year old idea, zero-knowledge proofs are almost 40 years old, proof of work predates Bitcoin by 15 years which makes it 30 years old.

I think the initial impractical prototypes for the core techniques were in the literature for a while but there's really no comparison between eg interactive ZK protocols and the succinct non-interactive proofs used by the cryptocurrency folks. The latter are computationally general (you don't have to roll a new one for each program) and many orders of magnitude more efficient.

I think it's important to give the cryptocurrency industry credit for the few corners in which it makes real (theory/tooling) contributions even if they're motivated by nonsense

I did not want to say that they invented or improved nothing, just that a lot of the building blocks already existed. I just looked this up, non-interactive zero-knowledge proof also seem to have a history back to the late 80s, but if cryptocurrencies gave us some improvements and new ideas that made them more practical, fine, I am not going to complain about that.

Like, huge tangible improvements.

You can do general purpose programming in all kinds of DSLs and Rust libraries that compiles down to big-but-practical arithmetic circuits and then generate proofs that y=f(x) without revealing x for arbitrary f. That really wasn't possible until a few years ago and emerged almost exclusively within the sphere of cryptocurrency-adjacent research. You can also use the succinctness of SNARKs to batch these proofs and shrink the verifier costs to almost nothing

It's a cool model for asymmetric computing, with low capacity verifiers collecting results from high capacity provers. It'll probably find uses outside deranged gambling...

Recent advances in SNARKs/STARKs/VDFs were funded by crypto. SNARKs have gone from unusably slow to reasonably efficient.

> I think you'll see people picking those techniques

Those techniques were already invented and in-use long beforehand though.

I think that needs emphasizing, because sometimes it feels like... Imagine that fans of the Segway claimed it will replace all other forms of transportation, and a worrying number of them are still out there crediting the (failing) product for inventing the wheel.

Merkle trees, yes! That was just an example of a technique that can be well hidden vs in the user's face.

Newer techniques like Verkle trees, SNARKs, STARKs, &c are.... well, new.

The way I see it, "blockchain" (NFTs, etc) are less technologies and more business-plans to make money--perhaps in a slightly more-literal sense than usual--from available tools.

It's kind of like ride-share services: They didn't invent cars or databases or dispatching systems or phone-apps, and while their investment might have spurred some new tools/libraries/algorithms they use, the broader usefulness of those inventions doesn't flow backward to mean they have a good/sustainable business.

There are even cases like "private blockchain" where the fad-marketing is getting used to mislabel what is actually just a regular old distributed database of yesteryear.

> They didn't invent cars

Can we really call the car an "invention"? After all, both the wheel and the steam engine already existed.

Those techniques were already invented and in-use long beforehand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com