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Well yeah, someone hired to work with the low-level nuts and bolts of blockchains would ideally need to know their way around actual bona-fide cryptography.

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Respectfully disagree. My experience is that they've read a couple chapters from Applied Cryptography and think "IACR" is a router manufacturer.

But we all see different parts of the industry. Happy to hear you're encountering more capable people in that industry.

Oh no I'm not speaking from experience, just saying that in principle you would want actual cryptography experts in that position, so there's no contradiction in terms. How that tends to play out in practice is another question.

There are definitely better cryptographers than me working at Zcash, for example.

I was at Microsoft for meetings once and one of the guys asked if I was a cryptographer. I replied that it depends on who else is in the room. If it's just me and my boss, I'd probably qualify as being a cryptographer. But if I'm in the room with Niels Ferguson or Adi Shamir, I should be considered a software engineer who is somewhat decent at reading math papers. At about the same time, Niels Ferguson walked in the room and I quickly commented "you should not consider me a cryptographer for the rest of this meeting."

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