I made a typographical error because I typed that with my thumb: the gentleman’s name is Dr. Philip Wadler FRS FRSE (
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Wadler), I also forgot his proper title as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
The contributions that merited his inclusion in a group that includes (in computing alone) people like Charles Babbage KH FRS and Alan Turing OBE FRS are too numerous for any HN comment: he’s got something like 20k citations of hundreds of papers.
His contributions while working at IOHK were IIRC substantially around advanced formal proof systems for typed lambda calculus, the most recent of his IOHK papers I read was describing a System F implementation in the Agda proof system.
I don’t think it’s called an appeal to authority when the topic is the merit of a field of study (I’ve never heard it referred to as a call to authority at all): when an overwhelming consensus of basically every reputable academic and scientific honor and award in the field (some among the highest honors in any field) are attached to research done over decades and reviewed, debated, cited, and recognized by a robust consensus, that’s an argument that the study was important, novel, rigorous, valuable and worthwhile. I cited the consensus of the entire reputable academic and scientific world because that’s how we codify a consensus into a formal recognition that a researcher has in the past, is currently, or is likely to again do important research. I think GP was mistaken to call this research junk or even imply it if someone is going to try to parse it that finely, and I thought that citing the ACM was a better citation than my own opinion.
I agree that git is a blockchain, though not a particularly Byzantine Fault Tolerant one, along with Mercurial and Nix and many other tools many of us use daily.
The broader convergence around previously disparate parts of the digital financial economy is just unambiguously happening: things like FedNow at the high end or Apple Pay / Venmo / Zelle / Wize / WeChat / etc. on a more retail level are arriving faster and faster, placing ever-greater demands on the technology involved, and similar pressures are producing related solutions: the NBBO system in US equities trading to name one example, the consolidated tape that results and the records around it used to be backed by all trades taking place on recorded phone lines, before that by taking place in a room full of witnesses, and before that in coffee shops and other gathering places. All of these systems were workable if imperfect solutions to questions of trust, escrow, reversibility or its converse, and broadly the ways in which Ricardian contracts are generally, in isolation, inadequate to promote a sufficient atmosphere of trust to admit active and reasonably efficient markets.
Cryptographically durable and tamper-resistant ledgers remain in a sort of transitional state where they back non-trivial commerce and much more but still comparatively small amounts of speculation/price discovery: the jury is out on whether or not cryptography and BFT research is going to hit the truly big leagues in terms of notional value: right now they’re somewhere in the rough ballpark of equities transactions daily in the maybe mid tens to low hundreds of billions in notional USD, making both a flea on the ass of an elephant compared to say global forex at something like 5-10 trillion a day, and derivatives are just really hard to estimate, but the notional value of all derivatives contracts is like, easily in the hundreds of trillions and there are days when a lot of that moves quickly.
But I wasn’t making the case that this stuff is like 100% locked-in the future, I was making a much weaker claim: that it’s dismissive and ignorant to call it “junk” and that what limited consequences fraudsters face for financial fraud are tightly clustered in this area.
It’s well-understood that the mechanism design of a combination of a floating transaction fee structure (gas) and a market in that unit of account with a lot of speculative activity in it is problematic to put it mildly: transactions become too expensive to facilitate significant commerce rather often. A lot of things are being tried to improve the emergent incentives, some with more noble motives than others, but that’s finance: if you’re under any illusion that innovation in finance is a constant battle between people trying to generate better outcomes and people trying to game the thing then you can easily disabuse yourself of that notion by learning about the history of finance and I’ll recommend two excellent places to start: the emergence of massive OTC derivatives markets that began in the 1980s but really got big a decade later, and the emergence of fully-digital equities and futures markets around the turn of the millennium.