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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?

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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.

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