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Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

Let's be honest, the vast majority of things we spend money on is a complete waste, focused solely on producing short-term feel-good chemicals in our brain.

Tasty food? Waste.

Fine wine? Waste.

Any car that costs more than $20k? Waste.

Blockbuster hollywood movies? Waste.

Housing that goes beyond our basic need for shelter? Waste.

The resources we've spent on crypto are, at the very least, pushing technological frontiers. And experimenting with new systems of finance that could improve on the foundations of our entire economy. Compared to all the other crap we spend money on, this is far less wasteful.

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> The resources we've spent on crypto are, at the very least, pushing technological frontiers.

What are some projects or technologies that have been driven forward by crypto companies that are usable outside the crypto-space?

If you peel back the feverish financialization, there are a few different areas of actual research which might be usable outside crypto, such as consensus methods for distributed computation. The one I have started following is the development of ZK proofs from a theoretical construct into a programming substrate. Traditional complexity texts focus on interactive ZK protocols, but non-interactive ZK proofs have been developed significantly in the crypto world. They have recently become usable for general purpose computing with interesting privacy guarantees: you can prove f(x) = y for a known f and y but without revealing x. This feels very powerful and related to other research fields like differential privacy.

Examples:

- Circom: https://iden3.io/circom

- Cairo: https://www.cairo-lang.org/docs/

- zkREPL: https://0xparc.org/blog/zkrepl

That's a great example. Thank you

No problem. I think this stuff will inevitably leak back out of the crypto social circles and hopefully power future privacy enhanced web apps.

This is definitely one of the opinions I've ever heard

I object to the car point. Any Prius with a lithium ion battery (a significant improvement over the old NiMH models) and less than 50,000 miles costs more than $20k.

It’s objectively the most practical car in terms of balancing mileage, longevity, cost-to-own, environmental impact, and convenience.

Although, I will admit Priuses being far north of $20k is due to temporary market conditions.

I think you are slightly biased. Let me offer a similar argument that hopefully will serve as a counterpoint:

“The money we spend on crack pushes humanity’s chemical frontiers. Experimenting with new methods of producing crack could result in improvements in our public health system!”

> vast majority of things we spend money on

> Tasty food. Fine wine. Car that costs more than $20k. Blockbuster hollywood movies. Housing that goes beyond our basic need for shelter.

I'd say ‘spoken like a true American’, but the mention of ‘fine wine’ gets in the way.

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