To understand how these scientific advances will change the blockchain world, it’s worth looking at how we got here in the first place. Blockchain uses a lot of computing power in ways that many once considered very wasteful. Again, back in the early days of computing, memory and computing resources were so scarce that people would leave out half the numbers of the year (the “19” in “1985”) to save space. A proof-of-work system with thousands of parallel processes would have been thought impossibly wasteful. The problem with blockchain is that it gets its security and value by doing things over and over again. Everyone is checking, verifying, and trying to reach consensus on balances and calculations. We could do all of this with 99% less effort if we could choose just one trusted party to manage the entire process. The problem is that there is currently a significant lack of trusted central authorities.
