I tried reading the article, but I don't think I really understood it. He talks about how the revolutionary thing is to make bitcoin relevant for payments---agreed---, but then he says we can do that by "using cryptography". I didn't really understand what he means by that, nor his example. I don't really think inefficient cryptographic algorithms is what's holding back payments adoption. I think the real revolutionary work is gonna be social and political, not technical.

I feared, or maybe expected, this reaction: I think it's kind of the correct reaction. The gap in the rather vague line of thinking I'm expressing here is exactly what you mention, especially for people who aren't in the weeds with Bitcoin research.

Maybe I should have mentioned specific projects like ShieldedCSV, though it really isn't about one specific project, it's about the class of things we can do. Payments that are shielded like zcash, but without a soft fork or a protocol change. Payments that can embed much more complicated state relationships like those needed to build a DEX like you can on Ethereum, but without a protocol change. Ecash where the mint can't rug you. Arbitrarily complex loan protocols (though this one tends not to be pure cryptography ... perhaps if you treat a stablecoin like tether as being cryptographically enforced, although that's sleight of hand, because it's fundamentally fiat money - but who knows?)

If your only goal is pure payments, then note that we are still somewhat short of the goal - can we make fully private payments that scale to at least 10s of millions of users if not higher, have them be quasi instant, have the usage requirements be light on data and bandwidth, have the receiver be offline with a static identifier. Etc. We have a large amount of that now, but we don't have it perfectly. I personally think that payments in the very purest sense are not enough, though they're clearly 50%-90% of what matters.

It was tough to end this article and keep it short and understandable. because "ok we can do cryptography, so what?" is a very natural response if you haven't spent 100s of hours studying zkSNARKs, lol.

I hoped that the Hal Finney SHA-1 preimage would at least give the intuition. Most people have no idea how powerful the things we can do are, today.

It maybe has faded now, but I remember when Ark and BitVM were first proposed, they mostly required a covenants soft fork to really be functional. Since then, people have found interesting ways to work around those requirements and deliver live versions of these things without any soft forks -- but with trade-offs.

I think waxwing is talking about more of this: using novel techniques in cryptography to work around protocol limitations. Instead of seeing what happened with Coldcard and Liquid and working to soft fork in some sort of vault architecture, try doing weird things with cryptography that might achieve the same result.

The same for privacy or more complicated contracts or whatever. I think it's advocating for a don't ask permission sort of attitude -- or perhaps that waxwing thinks a lot of projects have gotten caught up in thinking they need some sort of permission (to change bitcoin core or change the bitcoin protocol), when that may not be the case.

I think the real revolutionary work is gonna be social and political, not technical.

You may be right. But there is a certain temptation to just keep making the tech better.