The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

Ethereum, for example, is full of people building interesting things like off-chain low-cost trading using non-interactive zero knowledge proofs and actively working to make crypto less energy intensive and more useful. They don't want to sell you an NFT and it's not part of some elaborate rugpull- There are plenty of examples of people doing this important work because they legitimately believe that a world where fiat control is divorced from the levers of governmental power is a positive change.

There are also, of course, people trying to use those achievements as part of a weird shell game where the end result is giving gullible strangers nothing in exchange for something. That's sort of the human condition.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking

As a layman, I’m not touching crypto until I know what this means.

Yes, it's too complicated right now (so was https://www.!).

2) "zero knowledge" : Suppose I want to prove to you (or at least, give you very strong evidence) that I know a 3-coloring for the graph, but I don't want to give you any information about how to color the graph with 3 colors.

This can be done in a way where I first randomly permute the 3 colors, and then commit to a particular coloring without showing you anything about it (e.g. I give each node on the graph a random salt, and show you the hash of (the color and the salt appended) for each node ), and ask you to pick any two nodes of the graph. I reveal the color and salt for those two nodes, and you can check that they make the hash I said they did. If the two nodes are connected by an edge, then the colors I give have to be different (if they are the same then my proof is invalid and you shouldn't believe my claim that I have a coloring of the graph with 3 colors.)

By repeating this process many times (each time I randomly permute the colors/names-of-the-colors, and make a new commitment about each node), and each time you choose a random pair of (adjacent) vertices, then, if I didn't actually have a coloring of it with 3 colors, there's a high chance you would eventually find that the pairs you asked me to reveal, have the same color. So, if we keep doing this, and I'm telling the truth, eventually you should have strong evidence that I have a coloring for it, but without you getting any information about that coloring (other than that it is one) (because by permuting the colors each time, the only info you get about the nodes you asked about, is that the colors are different, which is already implied by it being a coloring.)

So, that would be a zero knowledge proof that I know how to color that graph using only 3 colors, with no 2 nodes having the same color.

(of course, the thing with coloring graphs is just an example, one which is relatively easy to give a protocol for.)

3) "non-interactive" : accomplishing the same sort of thing, except instead of us sending many messages back and forth like in what I described above, instead, I just do one computation (using the knowledge I have), and then I give you the output of that computation, and you can check that with some algorithm, and the algorithm says "yep" if I gave you a good output, and "nope" if I gave you a bad output, and, if I had the info I claim to have and used it for the input to my computation, then you will always get the result "yep", while if I don't have the info I claim to have, then the probability that I succeed in giving you a good output, one which would make your program say "yep", is negligible.

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Hopefully that helps make the idea more clear?

You might be wondering why this idea is applicable to cryptocurrency stuff?

A number of reasons. Being able to prove that you have some information that satisfies a given property, without revealing the information, is fairly powerful.

Don't criticize the tech, criticize the individual bad actors, like you did with Theranos.

One of the main talking points "web3" critics yell is "scams!", like they don't exist elsewhere.

If you do want to criticize the tech, leave the moral crusade out of it and say technically what is wrong with it, so we can have a technical debate about the feature in question.

Exactly like crypto often is.

It's the purest distillation of the "greater fool theory" in human history.

I'd rebuke your framing of leaving the morality of it aside. The more valid framing of a debate for new technology should be to prove that there are non scam-like applications of the technology that are superior to currently existing ones.

Regardless of their intentions this is a bad idea and deserves every line of criticism it receives.

Governance, law, and financial regulation exist for reasons that programmers have no place or reason to replace.

Wether they wish it or not there is a centralization of authority that will happen. In Ethereum’s case either the oligarchs with the most money will set the rules, or more likely, actual governments with armies and the ability to enforce laws will.

It was the people participating in the network.

'They' decided on a course of action by doing what most of the people in the system thought was correct. That sounds to me like a feature rather than a bug. At the time the consensus was that the network was young and brittle and breaking things was expected and an 'undo' was appropriate, as evidenced by the fact that a small number of people didn't think it was a good idea, tried to fork the chain to test that sentiment, and pretty quickly faded into obscurity.

Any distributed system that relies on trusting a consensus of individuals will be vulnerable to the majority of those individuals deciding something you don't want them to decide. That's how consensus works (in Ethereum as well as any other crypto BTW) The reason crypto works is that once you hit a certain scale most of the users are interested in keeping the network working. The ETH DAO was an interesting time when ETH was enough of a 'toy' that dev environment stuff like the community agreeing to undo 'oopsies' was conceivable. For better or worse (probably better) ETH is no longer a 'toy' and those mechanisms for undos don't really work anymore.

As in most things, the culprit is not technology, it's people. It's entirely possible to ignore the clear rugpulls and scams and just focus on the technically interesting parts. Quite a lot of people are quietly doing just that while everyone else is busy trying to scam each other and/or be religiously opposed to what amounts to a distributed database synchronization mechanism.

That's a fair criticism, even if I don't agree with it. I don't think it's possible to imagine a world where consensus is shared widely enough that 'mutually assured destruction' of the financial network prevents transaction censorship, particularly when zero knowledge based networks allow validation of network transactions without knowledge of who is transacting, what transaction is taking place, or when it might occur.

>Governance, law, and financial regulation exist for reasons that programmers have no place or reason to replace.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that governance, law, or financial regulation should go away. Those things seem important. The governments of the world can enforce those things like they always have. They just lose the ability to manufacture more money when it's time to fight a new war or pay off one special interest or another (but only if most of the people participating in that society buy into the idea that the government is not a good steward of that power)

Imagine a world where the people ruled by a government have some say in whether they're doing a good job with monetary policy or not. I certainly don't have that today - I get to punch the 'RED GUY' or 'BLUE GUY' button on my voting ticket but neither of them are particularly interested in changing something that fundamental.

Sounds great if you want to buy things law enforcement would be interested in tracking down.

> Those things seem important.

Understatement of the year.

> Imagine a world where the people ruled by a government have some say in whether they're doing a good job with monetary policy or not.

Assuming you live in the US, then you do -- it's called democracy.

But giving power to a handful of rich people and asking them to make monetary policy is an oligarchy and it's not a good idea.

Oh geez, we should probably stop doing that then.

This is what I mean about giving a bunch of programmers/developers the power to choose new forms of governance/financial infrastructure.

These are social structures that affect everyone and shouldn't be given to developers no matter how well-meaning they are.