"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That may be true now, but perhaps not in the future.

Heck, mathematicians in general thought number theory was “useless” up until only around 40 years ago. Now we know that our world could not have developed this way without the creation of modern cryptography.

I think number theory serves as a great example for why basic research is so important to humanity.

Impractical for daily usage? Surely you use TLS daily, in some fashion, do you not?