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Comment by iskander | Hacker News Reader

I think the evolution of "decentralized" infrastructure will start to bring out a lot more overlap between "traditional" decentralization communities (building stuff like Beaker browser) and some of the useful bits of crypto.

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> some of the useful bits of crypto

There is actually a ton of interesting and useful innovation happening in the crypto space that isn’t necessarily crypto-specific. If hacker news wasn’t so die-hard anti-crypto then more people would see that.

- zero-knowledge proofs

- quadratic funding

- verkle trees

- etc.

At the same time, I think it's a lot to expect of people to wade through the feverish speculative bubble to make sense of what technology is interesting. I think it would be nice if some of this stuff started making its way out of currency associated blockchain projects and into the wider world of decentralized algorithms and protocols.

Yes, I think this is both the biggest opportunity, and the biggest challenge, especially as I think there's been a growing separation between those two communities in the last few months and years. There's so many good ideas and implementations (and investment in harder problems of distributed systems) in the crypto/blockchain/web3 space, and a lot of hard-won experience and genuine applications in, as you say, "traditional" communities. It's just a matter of finding some sort of common ground.

I do think that the https://getdweb.net/ community is a model of how that crossover can work. It's also something I think a lot about at FFDW, which because of IPFS and Filecoin, has its feet in both camps.

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