| > 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. Yes, but their current popularity (and the reason why so much effort is put into this subfield of cryptological research these days) is most likely due to their use in the context of cryptocurrencies, as far as I can tell. If I'm wrong, please let me know. > Maybe there are real people working on crypto problems or maybe there is some sort of Crypto winter akin to AI winter[1]. Most likely, both. Once the low-hanging fruit is picked, things tend to slow down a bit (at least for a while). As you pointed out, this is common in many research fields, and not something specific to "blockchain tech". > 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. Just because Satoshi is a better programmer than Vitalik (I don't know if it's the case, but I'll assume it to be true), and he decided to leave the field (allegedly), it still doesn't mean that there aren't capable people out there working in the field. > Is Gavin Andresen[2] still involved? From what I can tell, yes: http://gavinandresen.ninja/ > These are the kind of people I am talking about. Fair enough. But then the argument should be that "most big-shots are not working in the field" rather than "there aren't any real computer scientists and cryptographers working in the field", as the person I replied to was saying. I just responded because it sounded a bit like a "no true scotsman" fallacy (i.e. "a real computer scientist or cryptographer would be working on more serious things"). It's almost as if, if you are working in something blockchain-related, you must be a bad professional somehow (or, worse, a scammer). |
I'm trying to argue that blockchain/crypto industry is amateur and infant and you think I work in such industry and scam people around. I mean c'mon!