People’s opinion is the ultimate law. If you find a loophole in a contract that gives you everybody’s money, people will just take it back.
It's like war: We don't like war, we don't like people being killed, but man, the amount of technology progress made during war is good.
So, even if you hate crypto; the fact that it is enabling research in cryptographic theory (even if for stupid goals) is good.
Yes but ... most/all of this research is for solving weird self-made problems created from some flawed premise like "we need a decentralized sequencer" or "we need a hash function that can't be profitably made into an ASIC". A lot of the zk research is for "roll-ups", themselves a horrifically complex "solution" for Ethereum's inability to scale its consensus.
The people in and around the Ethereum Foundation are solving very interesting problems but nobody talk about it on HN. For example I believe they are at the forefront of the use zero-knowledge proofs.
Just dig into [0].
Is the Ethereum Foundation and broader project dedicated to pumping the cryptocurrency ETH? obviously not and they are not by far the top holder of it.
The fact that the crypto is not providing real returns is actually one of the main criticism of the project.
- [0] https://ethereum-magicians.org/