To understand how these scientific improvements will change the world of blockchains, it’s worth looking at how we got here in the first place: blockchains use lots of computing power in a way that many would have, once upon a time, considered very wasteful. Again, if you go back to the early days of computing, memory and compute resources were so scarce that people left off the half the year number (The “19” in “1985”) to save space. A proof of work system with thousands of parallel processes would have been considered impossibly wasteful. The problem with blockchains is that they get their security and value from re-doing stuff repeatedly. Everyone is checking balances and calculations and verifying them and trying to reach consensus. If you could just pick one trustworthy party to manage the whole process, we could do this all with 99% less effort. The problem is that we are, currently, rather depressingly short of trustworthy central authorities.
