There seems to be a rough rule that new fundamental discoveries (e.g. new theories like thermodynamics, QM, GRT) are turned into auccessful applications for the masses some 50 to 70 years later. It's a rule of thumb at best, but it holds for quite a few cases.
The trouble then is: what were the major new discoveries of the last 50 years? Science has mostly confirmed and fleshed out existing knowledge. So engineers are mostly stuck with optimizing what we have instead of coming up with things that are fundamentally new and foreign.
Isn’t the claim that the rate of change is increasing? That same amount of change in the past 125 years should occur in half or quarter of the time, for example.
rate of change may actually be decreasing, as the low hanging fruit isn't there anymore.
it may be that big breakthroughs like the last century will be fewer and further apart, especially with lots of energy (physical and intelectual) spent on bitcoin, social media and consuming in general
Is there a way to use the Bitcoin hash rate to solve more meaningful problems than SHA-256 while still being cryptographically secure? Imagine if we could send math problems to the Bitcoin network, is this possible?
