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Comment by bsenftner

4 days ago

[flagged]

> This is why all of crypto is a fraud...

Are you using "crypto" here to mean "cryptocurrency", rather than "cryptography"? Because if so, that's not obvious considering you just mentioned cryptographers in the previous sentence.

If, on the other hand, you mean "all of cryptography is a fraud", then I'm curious to know what makes you think that.

Cryptography is big enough that you can't expect every academic cryptographer to be intimately familiar with every obscure theoretical result.

Yes, all cryptocurrency is basically a scam, but that's independent from whether the Ethereum foundation's experts know X or not.

One anecdote => All Ethereum’s cryptographers are a fraud => All crypto is a fraud

You're deducing a lot from this one quote lol

  • "all crypto is fraud" stands alone just fine. It's very clear that the blockchain is 100% BS to anyone who is not incentivized to see it as valid.

    • > "all crypto is fraud" stands alone just fine.

      It might, but in this case it is preceded by "This is why", which makes the sentence as a whole simply wrong.

      1 reply →

    • hard disagree here. I think crypto currencies are built on hype and bluster and scams, but blockchain as a technology is actually super interesting. There are plenty of cool use cases for an open immutable ledger that aren't scammy.

      15 replies →

    • > It's very clear that the blockchain is 100% BS…

      Hmm. The blockchain is actually a very clever solution to a very old coordination problem. In that sense it is not BS at all.

      But I agree that it is an open question whether it can directly support a useful economy the way a currency can. It doesn’t seem to have the throughput for that, to start with. But maybe it could be useful for interbank settlements, if for some reason traditional methods weren’t working.

      4 replies →

That piece of information about Ethereum's cryptographers does not mean "all of crypto is a fraud".

  • No, but if crypto was generally legit, one might expect the people working on Ethereum cryptography to know their area of specialisation...

  • you're right. "all of crypto is fraud" and the Ethereum cryptographers not knowing about this important detail are two statements that are true separately.

> Ethereum’s cryptographers are not cryptographers

I guess I'll bite, what are they then? If they're focusing on the cryptography of a project, doesn't that make them cryptographers? Or you mean they aren't "real cryptographers"?

> It's a wish club of technical yes people.

Isn't that basically one of the ways doing innovation? Instead of saying "No, that's not possible" when someone asks if they can build something faster than a horse and carriage, a bunch of people get together to see if there any way of doing that, trying to avoid any per-concieved ideas about if it's actually possible or not.

  • Isn't that basically one of the ways doing innovation? Instead of saying "No, that's not possible" when someone asks if they can build something faster than a horse and carriage, a bunch of people get together to see if there any way of doing that, trying to avoid any per-concieved ideas about if it's actually possible or not.

    Yes, but if people graduate from engineering schools that explicitly teach the concepts of the combustion engine, and the carriage manufacturers claiming to be engineers are unaware of basic principles like the 4 stroke cycle, you have a completely different kind of problem.

  • It's the old "we use first principles thinking" approach. Too often it means "we don't actually know or care what came before us, we just move fast and break things, how hard can it be lol yolo" Then that's what you get, insufficiently educated folks re-inventing the wheel, repeating mistakes others have done before.

    Yes, sometimes you need to break out from pre-conceived notions, evaluating whether conditions have changed and earlier assumptions are maybe not valid anymore. But that's no excuse to be ignorant.

  • > Isn't that basically one of the ways doing innovation? Instead of saying "No, that's not possible" when someone asks if they can build something faster than a horse and carriage, a bunch of people get together to see if there any way of doing that, trying to avoid any per-concieved ideas about if it's actually possible or not.

    This does not take real-world limits into account. There are limits to information theory (which includes crypto), thermodynamics and mechanics that make certain things generally impossible. Like a perpetuum mobile. Social or intelligence factors do not matter. Knowing your field also includes understanding those "hard" limits.

lol. I work in Applied cryptography and I don’t know a harder distributed system built on such a broad spectrum of primitives which has seen such high uptime.

Are you qualified to speak on this topic?