Ansgar Dietrichs

And so now this is what basically the main unlock here is that basically now we're bringing the same efficiencies that people are used to from this like one miner, everyone can verify easily.

We're bringing that same efficiency to the entire block

And of course, on Bitcoin, the actual Bitcoin block is very small.

It's a very simple operation on Ethereum because you can run smart contracts and we are massively scaling the throughput.

It's much more complex.

Like the vast majority of the overhead in processing and following the chain is not the consensus part, not the proof of stake part, but it is the actual contents of a block.

So what has changed on cryptography?

Actually, my friends from the Xerox PARC team, they are like one of those cryptography research labs.

They always talk about, I think they call it, maybe I'm getting this slightly wrong, but they call it the first generation of cryptography and the second generation of cryptography.

What was the first generation of cryptography?

It was...

basically handcrafted algorithms for very specific use cases.

So a signature algorithm or a hash function or anything that basically, it fulfills a very specific purpose and you can use it in a very specific context.

And those are amazing, right?

And that's been the story of cryptography for the last 50 years, right?

It's basically more sophisticated special purpose mechanisms.

And those were already very mature when say Bitcoin started, right?

This is why they were able to just take the concept of hash functions off the shelf and you can do amazing things, signature mechanisms, all that kind of stuff.

What is like very new, it basically started, I don't know, a decade ago or something like this, probably academically a little bit earlier.

I'm not actually a cryptography expert myself, so I don't know the exact kind of like early story there, but that's basically like cryptography 2.0 in a sense.