68 lines
3.1 KiB
Plaintext
68 lines
3.1 KiB
Plaintext
[1]Tom MacWright
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tom@macwright.com
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[2]Tom MacWright
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• [3]Writing
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• [4]Reading
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• [5]Photos
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• [6]Projects
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• [7]Drawings
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• [8]Micro⇠
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• [9]About
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Crypto's missing plateau of productivity
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2024-09-15
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I think that even the most overhyped technology usually delivers some benefit
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to the world. And often succeeds quietly, long after the hype has died. Recent
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examples include 3D printing, which has found massive success in prototyping,
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medical applications - a friend had a filling 3D-printed right in his doctor’s
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office - and niche consumer items. Etsy is awash with 3D printed lamps, some
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[10]even that I own. Or drones, which are now used all the time in news
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coverage, on job sites, and by people filming themselves hiking.
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I suspect that even if Augmented Reality doesn’t take off, it’ll leave in its
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wake big advances in miniaturized projectors, improved optics, and scene
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understanding algorithms in computer vision and ML. The internet of things
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didn’t really work and most people’s Alexa speakers are only used for setting
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alarms, but the hype-wave did justify the deployment of much-needed
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technologies like IPv6, Zigbee, and BLE.
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So, the thought is: none of this applies to crypto. It didn’t work, and it also
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didn’t fund the development of any lasting technological advance. There’s no
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legacy. The crypto industry’s research didn’t create new foundations for
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building decentralized databases. Next-generation cryptography kept rolling on,
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and, as far as I know, none of it owes much to the cryptocurrency industry.
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Nothing new has been discovered about economics: as Matt Levine says, [11]“One
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thing that I say frequently around here is that crypto keeps learning the
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lessons of traditional finance at high speed.” It’s hard to name anything of
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value that came out of this hype wave. We incinerated all that investment, and
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randomly redistributed some wealth, and… what else?
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The best I can come up with is the popularization of [12]zero-knowledge proofs,
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which play some role in Zerocash and Ethereum but are a fundamental advance in
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security and have other applications.
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Maybe there’s something I’m missing? But it reminds me of [13]the end of Burn
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After Reading: “What did we learn? We learned not to do it again.”
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References:
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[1] https://macwright.com/
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[2] https://macwright.com/
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[3] https://macwright.com/writing/
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[4] https://macwright.com/reading/
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[5] https://macwright.com/photos/
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[6] https://macwright.com/projects/
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[7] https://macwright.com/drawings/
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[8] https://macwright.com/micro/
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[9] https://macwright.com/about/
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[10] https://www.etsy.com/listing/1001875399/aspen-table-lamp-mushroom-lamp-modern?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=3d+printed+lamp&ref=sr_gallery-1-7&bes=1&sts=1&ret=1&content_source=34ccc20e2da3df5906473c82c6fb7ae0e3bcf572%253A1001875399&organic_search_click=1
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[11] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-08-15/stablecoins-can-have-bank-runs
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[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-interactive_zero-knowledge_proof
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[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlA9hmrC8DU
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