I will have to dedicate an evening to this paper. However I can say that I admire Vitalik's tenacity. This is not a detraction of his achievement; keeping in mind that this guy dropped out of his formal education to pursue explorations and meditations in the field of crypto, and succeeding as he is is nothing short of inspirational.
It's strange to imply he is some kind of underdog when his net worth is probably around $100M. He can spend the rest of his days reflecting on whatever topic he wants, as can his children, and his great grand children, and their children. His great great great grand children may need to get a job though.
Unless you set up money in a trust, it has a tendency to disappear through the generations quickly. And even in a trust, by the 3rd or 4th generation there is often not too much to go around.
There's a saying where I'm from: "clogs to clogs in three generations". Man works himself up from clog-wearing poverty to wealth; son seems the dad's journey and values wealth; grandson grows up in wealth and doesn't understand how it happened so loses it.
Blockchain has extremely limited use cases (especially when compared to the hype), but it is great to see that it is resulting in widespread interest in applied cryptography in general.
A lot of the limited ones which exists are for high volume transactions, so it matters a lot more than we think. But the hype is sometime way too much.
The entire point of proof-of-work cryptography is to make things slower, and blockchain is built on proof-of-work, so yeah, applications are limited to situations where slowness is a feature. That's very few situations.
But there is an entire world of crypto outside of proof-of-work and I'm glad people are more interested in these more useful parts of crypto now.
people said this kind of thing about computers, the web, etc at some point; blockchains solve previously intractable coordination problems, we ain’t seen nothin yet
We’re over a decade in and there’s no evidence supporting your assertion: almost nobody would have an impact on their daily life if blockchains suddenly disappeared.
In 10 years, the web went from a curiosity at CERN to transforming the global economy, and blockchain applications have much lower barriers to entry than 1990s computer hardware or network pricing. Digital computing went from Alan Turing’s papers to being a decisive factor in WWII over the same period, and similarly had much greater entry requirements.
