[dragontamer]

No. There's a big difference.

When Webvan went bankrupt, they truly bought all of those warehouses / refrigerated vans. They were honest about their business idea.

When "Africrypt" (a recent Crypto group) stole $3.6 Billion from its customers, that's straight up fraud and would not stand even back in the dot-com boom in the 90s. That's the sort of thing US Regulators are trying to protect investors from.

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You still might invest into a bad idea (ex: Webvan or Theranos), but those CEOs are truly spending money on vans / warehouses / poorly designed blood tests and not just actively stealing it from their investors.

Even when companies criminally lie (ex: Enron or Worldcom), its a far lesser crime than what the Africrypt brothers did just a few weeks ago. The size and scope of the scams currently going on in the Blockchain world is far worse than what happens in US regulated markets.

[mrkramer]

I agree with you on Webvan but Theranos was pure fraud.

The so called "Crypto" industry will mature when regulation happens and when real cryptographers and real computer scientists enter the scene and start innovating. Until then we have hyped up teens playing with the buzzwords like blockchain and decentralized finance.

>The size and scope of the scams currently going on in the Blockchain world is far worse than what happens in US regulated markets.

I somewhat tend to believe that governments all around the world are giving the "Blockchain world" grace period of not being tightly regulated so they can catch as many crypto criminals as they can because let's be honest if these guys were not stealing in the crypto world they would be stealing somewhere else. And I also tend to believe that current financial regulations are enough to regulate crypto as it is but governments are moving slowly as usual.

[arcticbull]

It's been almost 14 years, so where are the "real cryptographers" and "real computer scientists?" I suspect they've been searching and realized there's no "there" there.

[mrkramer]

I guess they are not interested; Microsoft recently shut down its Azure blockchain service[0] for example. Facebook made its own crypto coin but I am afraid that will lead to nowhere. Google and Amazon are not very interested as well so real cryptographers and real computer scientists are working on other stuff and on other problems.

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-shutting-down-its...

[dkshdkjshdk]

Maybe you can find some here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?&q=zksnark

[mrkramer]

For example in Cryptology Eprint Archive for current year[0] majority of research papers are unrelated to blockchain and cryptocurrencies although you can find couple of dozens of such papers.

P.S. By quickly searching through the list there are around 900 papers of which around 30 are blockchain, cryptocurrency and electronic/digital cash related.

[0] https://eprint.iacr.org/curr/

[dkshdkjshdk]

Just because the majority of a field of research is not working on a certain subfield, doesn't mean that there aren't capable people working in such subfield. As far as I can tell, you seem to be confirming that there are "real" computer scientists and cryptographers currently working on such things.

> P.S. By quickly searching through the list there are around 900 papers of which around 30 are blockchain, cryptocurrency and electronic/digital cash related.

If you just Ctrl+F'd for those terms, it is likely that you are leaving out some (many?) papers. For example: did you count these two...

"VCProof: Constructing Shorter and Faster-to-Verify zkSNARKs with Vector Oracles", by Yuncong Zhang and Ren Zhang and Geng Wang and Dawu Gu

"On Simulation-Extractability of Universal zkSNARKs", by Markulf Kohlweiss and Michał Zając

?

My point: it might not be 100% obvious whether a certain cryptographic primitive (or line of research) is "blockchain-related" or not.

As far as I can tell, whether you like the subfield or not, it does seem like there is some fundamental cryptographical research being done as a consequence of the "blockchain" craze (e.g. zero-knowledge proof systems, robust consensus mechanisms in adversarial settings, ring confidential transactions).

EDIT: if you Ctrl+F for "smart contract", for example, you'll get half a dozen more; if you Ctrl+F for "byzantine", you'll get some more; if you Ctrl+F for "zero-knowledge", you'll get 21 more; "cross-chain", "mining", etc.

[mrkramer]

zkSNARKs are not only meant and used for cryptocurrencies. They are decades old technology but ofc they can be used for all sorts of solutions including cryptocurrencies.

Maybe there are real people working on crypto problems or maybe there is some sort of Crypto winter akin to AI winter[1].

Let's take Satoshi for example a top notch computer scientist and a top notch C++ programmer. Who is even close to him? Vitalik? Kid who dropped out of college and rediscovered Satoshi's smart contract scripting language that Bitcoin had way back in 2008. Is Gavin Andresen[2] still involved? A 3D computer graphics programmer who worked in the Silicon Valley back in the 90s. These are the kind of people I am talking about.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Andresen