Esteban Küber 
I wonder what the long lasting impact of the cryptocurrency craze will be. Will there be any white paper, technology or insight that gets repurposed for something useful?
Nov 13, 2022 at 6:26pmWeb
Show threadPaul CantrellNov 13, 2022

@ekuber There’s a bit of nifty data structures thinking buried in the rubble. Maybe something there?

An analogy I used several times in the last year: it’s like the general public suddenly because weirdly obsessed with B* trees because they thought they’d get rich off them.

Show threadAme the Squirrel Nov 13, 2022
@ekuber i keep thinking that blockchains would be infinitely more useful as audit logs of critical systems & codebases, assuming we could make them computationally less annoying
Show threadEsteban Küber Nov 13, 2022
@onlyhavecans every use case I can think of you want tamper evidence and maybe speed (so replication and verification, not online conflict resolution in an adversarial distributed network).
Show threadHugo 雨果Nov 13, 2022
@ekuber Banks using a blockchain (eg: a network where each bank get exactly one node) could be super interesting for a distributed append-only log with consensus.
Show threadEsteban Küber Nov 13, 2022
@whynothugo why would a single entity (a bank network) want to operate a network predicated on adversarial nodes? Unless you're talking not of bank branches but the entire inter bankikg system. The thing that confuses me is that if you look at the European system, they already have quick effective transfer across banks. It wasn't a tech problem, but a social one that legislation managed to push on.
Show threadHugo 雨果Nov 14, 2022

@ekuber Banks: plural. I meant across banks, not within a single bank; that wouldn't be very useful.

I'm sure there are other solutions; each with their up and downsides. A blockchain keeps a nice distributed ledger, and can scale outside of a single jurisdiction. Note that you don't need proof of work for this particular use case; use can have blockchains without it.

Show threaddemofoxNov 13, 2022
@ekuber how bout a few psychology papers too?
Show threadsigaloidNov 13, 2022
@ekuber Me personally, I don’t believe the massive crypto market’s use of GPUs will saturate the gamers market - hoping for a price crash of older powerful cars.
Show threadEsteban Küber Nov 13, 2022
@sigaloid I feel that gaming passed the "visual fidelity"/"cost of game production" threshold some time back, so although the additional cheap compute power might not be taken advantage by most games. Having said that, maybe there's some application of stable diffusion or some other GPU intensive operation that might become common part of regular computer use.
Show threadsigaloidNov 14, 2022
@ekuber Yep, honestly I'm hoping for a crash for older 4gb cards specifically for stable diffusion 😅
Show threadsupersingularNov 16, 2022

@ekuber the chromium platform being the defacto way to deliver applications to the user, I hope we get a more accountable way of delivering applications than "download the JS anew, hope the server didn't tamper with it and run it".

Mobile app stores disallow the developer to serve a different app per-user, so if you have a copy of the app you know security-researchers will also have access to it (unless you distrust the app store owner).

Show threadsupersingularNov 16, 2022

@ekuber though this is only tangentially related to cryptocurrency, but I believe the space has a need for such technology.

See also:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1121 ("ProtonMail Webmail Does Not Provide End-to-End Encryption", because the Webserver is trusted to deliver the correct code)

https://github.com/WICG/isolated-web-apps/blob/main/README.md

An Analysis of the ProtonMail Cryptographic Architecture

ProtonMail is an online email service that claims to offer end-to-end encryption such that "even [ProtonMail] cannot read and decrypt [user] emails." The service, based in Switzerland, offers email access via webmail and smartphone applications to over five million users as of November 2018. In this work, we provide the first independent analysis of ProtonMail's cryptographic architecture. We find that for the majority of ProtonMail users, no end-to-end encryption guarantees have ever been provided by the ProtonMail service and that the "Zero-Knowledge Password Proofs" are negated by the service itself. We also find and document weaknesses in ProtonMail's "Encrypt-to-Outside" feature. We justify our findings against well-defined security goals and conclude with recommendations.

IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive