I work in this area and to me, the tech is still super interesting. In particular, things like zero knowledge proof and related scaling/privacy solutions are at the forefront of cryptography in my opinion.
I gave the "industry" a pretty thorough deep dive; I learned Solidity, wrote a bunch of smart contracts, tried a lot of DeFi, and listened to ~100 episodes of the Zero Knowledge podcast.
My impression on the other end of it is that the "tech" is interesting in a purely academic sense but most of the participants are building things they know have no use and engaging in a lot of motivated reasoning about the future to justify drawing money in from the outside.
Like, it can all be a lot of fun! And some techniques, like all ZK folding schemes, are mathematical magic. But, no one wants code to be law and pretty much no one should be managing private keys tied to money.
Cryptocurrencies have not actually invented much new technology, they mostly combined existing ideas in new ways. Merkel trees, for example, are an almost 50 year old idea, zero-knowledge proofs are almost 40 years old, proof of work predates Bitcoin by 15 years which makes it 30 years old.
I think the initial impractical prototypes for the core techniques were in the literature for a while but there's really no comparison between eg interactive ZK protocols and the succinct non-interactive proofs used by the cryptocurrency folks. The latter are computationally general (you don't have to roll a new one for each program) and many orders of magnitude more efficient.
I think it's important to give the cryptocurrency industry credit for the few corners in which it makes real (theory/tooling) contributions even if they're motivated by nonsense
I did not want to say that they invented or improved nothing, just that a lot of the building blocks already existed. I just looked this up, non-interactive zero-knowledge proof also seem to have a history back to the late 80s, but if cryptocurrencies gave us some improvements and new ideas that made them more practical, fine, I am not going to complain about that.
You can do general purpose programming in all kinds of DSLs and Rust libraries that compiles down to big-but-practical arithmetic circuits and then generate proofs that y=f(x) without revealing x for arbitrary f. That really wasn't possible until a few years ago and emerged almost exclusively within the sphere of cryptocurrency-adjacent research. You can also use the succinctness of SNARKs to batch these proofs and shrink the verifier costs to almost nothing
It's a cool model for asymmetric computing, with low capacity verifiers collecting results from high capacity provers. It'll probably find uses outside deranged gambling...
> I think you'll see people picking those techniques
Those techniques were already invented and in-use long beforehand though.
I think that needs emphasizing, because sometimes it feels like... Imagine that fans of the Segway claimed it will replace all other forms of transportation, and a worrying number of them are still out there crediting the (failing) product for inventing the wheel.
The way I see it, "blockchain" (NFTs, etc) are less technologies and more business-plans to make money--perhaps in a slightly more-literal sense than usual--from available tools.
It's kind of like ride-share services: They didn't invent cars or databases or dispatching systems or phone-apps, and while their investment might have spurred some new tools/libraries/algorithms they use, the broader usefulness of those inventions doesn't flow backward to mean they have a good/sustainable business.
There are even cases like "private blockchain" where the fad-marketing is getting used to mislabel what is actually just a regular old distributed database of yesteryear.
A solution in search of a problem? Maybe they could apply it to something like protecting a person's online identity rather than a digital coin/currency. Or something along the lines of Distributed Apps instead of DeFi.
There aren't any use cases for crypto technology except crypto. It relies on so many specific assumptions that none of the components make sense when taken out of context.
Cheap and safe payments are of tremendous utility.
The problem is that anonymous payments are essentially illegal under current regulations designed to protect the large incumbent businesses.
Cryptocurrencies could render paywalls and signupwalls a thing of the past, allowing you to pay a fraction of a penny for a page view automatically in browser without an account.
There are some pretty big, obvious reason why true anonymous payments are illegal under a lot of regulations in different countries. Supporting current big businesses is pretty damn far down the list.
I was with you until "pay a fraction of a penny for a page view". Trying to push the web back into the closed pay for access model is something that leaves a bad taste in many people's mouths. I'd say it's only a positive thing if it's funding new nodes working to route around existing attempts at artificial scarcity (to drive the price to within an epsilon of zero). But given the way the legal shakedown regime works we know it won't actually play out that way.
It's a different type of primitive, which can be used safely or unsafely. For example if you're selling something on craigslist, then it's unsafe to accept any form of payment that can be reversed after the item leaves.
My impression on the other end of it is that the "tech" is interesting in a purely academic sense but most of the participants are building things they know have no use and engaging in a lot of motivated reasoning about the future to justify drawing money in from the outside.
Like, it can all be a lot of fun! And some techniques, like all ZK folding schemes, are mathematical magic. But, no one wants code to be law and pretty much no one should be managing private keys tied to money.
It's a very cool but failed idea.