To understand how these scientific advancements will change the world of blockchains, it’s worth looking at how we got here in the first place: blockchains use a lot of computing power in a way that many would once have considered highly wasteful. Again, if you go back to the early days of computing, memory and computational resources were so scarce that people would drop the half-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 doing things over and over again. Everyone is checking and verifying balances and calculations and trying to reach consensus. If you could just choose one trusted party to manage the entire process, we could do all of this with 99% less effort. The problem is that we currently have a depressingly low number of trusted central authorities.