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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

> Ethereum’s cryptographers are not cryptographers

I guess I'll bite, what are they then? If they're focusing on the cryptography of a project, doesn't that make them cryptographers? Or you mean they aren't "real cryptographers"?

> It's a wish club of technical yes people.

Isn't that basically one of the ways doing innovation? Instead of saying "No, that's not possible" when someone asks if they can build something faster than a horse and carriage, a bunch of people get together to see if there any way of doing that, trying to avoid any per-concieved ideas about if it's actually possible or not.

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Yes, but if people graduate from engineering schools that explicitly teach the concepts of the combustion engine, and the carriage manufacturers claiming to be engineers are unaware of basic principles like the 4 stroke cycle, you have a completely different kind of problem.

It's the old "we use first principles thinking" approach. Too often it means "we don't actually know or care what came before us, we just move fast and break things, how hard can it be lol yolo" Then that's what you get, insufficiently educated folks re-inventing the wheel, repeating mistakes others have done before.

Yes, sometimes you need to break out from pre-conceived notions, evaluating whether conditions have changed and earlier assumptions are maybe not valid anymore. But that's no excuse to be ignorant.

> Isn't that basically one of the ways doing innovation? Instead of saying "No, that's not possible" when someone asks if they can build something faster than a horse and carriage, a bunch of people get together to see if there any way of doing that, trying to avoid any per-concieved ideas about if it's actually possible or not.

This does not take real-world limits into account. There are limits to information theory (which includes crypto), thermodynamics and mechanics that make certain things generally impossible. Like a perpetuum mobile. Social or intelligence factors do not matter. Knowing your field also includes understanding those "hard" limits.

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