[morelisp]

But cryptocurrency doesn't really solve these in a technically interesting way, as it's neither consistent nor available under partition. The pressure to keep the chain consistent and unified is a purely social one - your BTC is only valuable to other people on the same chain as you.

[bowsamic]

I don't know, looking into the papers that are written in crypto research, especially in academia, it seems like there is a lot of very technically interesting stuff going on, especially with zero knowledge proofs for example...

[morelisp]

These are largely (if not completely) applications of existing zero-knowledge algorithms to blockchain data, not the application of blockchains to solve some difficult ZK problems or make a useful-outside-of-blockchain novel ZK construction.

[bowsamic]

And? Applications of research brings new insights into that thing.

[stale2002]

> The pressure to keep the chain consistent and unified is a purely social one

So then the innovation of cryptocurrency was an economic one.

It does have the word "currency" in it, so that should not be surprising.

[morelisp]

I'll leave the question of whether it's economically interesting to economists and sociologists (though I suspect the answer is it's not at least in this regard, as the pressure to use the same non-blockchain currency seems not too different across the sweep of history). The claim was:

> It turns out that "distributed linked list" is actually a difficult problem that involves very interesting challenges

It's not that.

[bowsamic]

> It's not that.

Are you saying it's easy? The PoS algorithms I've read seem quite complicated, and honestly quite interesting. Also there is a lot of academic research about this stuff, some of it private, some of it public.

I mean, I know there are people out there who think that, for example, particle physics is totally uninteresting, and you are of course free to decide that a given research area is totally uninteresting, but you can't expect others to agree. It is just your opinion