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.
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.