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Comment by sunshine-o | Hacker News Reader

You are forgetting Ethereum which is the defacto main standard and driver in the "crypto industry". Most of those chains are in fact EVM based (so outside of Bitcoin, XRP or Solana).

The people in and around the Ethereum Foundation are solving very interesting problems but nobody talk about it on HN. For example I believe they are at the forefront of the use zero-knowledge proofs.

Just dig into [0].

Is the Ethereum Foundation and broader project dedicated to pumping the cryptocurrency ETH? obviously not and they are not by far the top holder of it.

The fact that the crypto is not providing real returns is actually one of the main criticism of the project.

- [0] https://ethereum-magicians.org/

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Ethereum promised smart contracts where "code is law", but rewrote the rules of their system when a bug was found in the first popular smart contract, the DAO. That's when I lost all interest in it.

Cool. Do you still use computers, or?

I think it’s okay. Crypto devs can’t make a hard fork each time they want to revert something, and even if they do, people decide how much it’s worth to them (by staying on the old chain, like ETC in this case).

People’s opinion is the ultimate law. If you find a loophole in a contract that gives you everybody’s money, people will just take it back.

What is the main success for an Ethereum project that solves something that can't be solved without crypto or in a hugely more efficient/better way? I'm a crypto skeptic and I've never been introduced where crypto actually solves a problem.

Read the GP comment again. I don't know if Ethereum has, is or will ever get to whatever grandiose goal they have. But the one thing that I love has done is provide intelligent people with funds to research things like ZKSNARKs and similar cryptographic constructs.

It's like war: We don't like war, we don't like people being killed, but man, the amount of technology progress made during war is good.

So, even if you hate crypto; the fact that it is enabling research in cryptographic theory (even if for stupid goals) is good.

> enabling research in cryptographic theory

Yes but ... most/all of this research is for solving weird self-made problems created from some flawed premise like "we need a decentralized sequencer" or "we need a hash function that can't be profitably made into an ASIC". A lot of the zk research is for "roll-ups", themselves a horrifically complex "solution" for Ethereum's inability to scale its consensus.

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