Crypto has come a long way since Ethereum was first conceived and what was impossible only a few months ago is now 100% practical. Today there are A LOT of new techniques that allow us to largely implement decentralized autonomous applications on any blockchain (no matter how limited) - a fact I feel often gets missed out in all of the Ethereum hype.<p>If you have a lot a techniques like zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic computations, multi-party computation, indistinishability (sic) obfuscation (not quite practical yet), and various threshold schemes - you will quickly realize we could basically already do everything that Ethereum was designed for from the start. In fact - a lot of the new crypto techniques make it possible to scale DAC applications even better than what blockchains would allow since you can implement a lot of crypto-application protocols outside of the blockchain and keep only the hash-locked payments on the chain (which I honestly think is preferable.)<p>It just seems to me like Vitalik largely invented Ethereum because he didn&#x27;t want to bother messing around with all the crypto-hacking that&#x27;s required to implement self-enforcing, autonomous contracts (which is half the fun.) My biggest problem with this is people act like this isn&#x27;t possible with Bitcoin when we had working smart contracts (and special coins for smart contracts) before Ethereum even existed. Interestingly enough - there&#x27;s even ways to make the answer to any computable problem the keys to unlock a Bitcoin payment which means if you structure your crypto-protocol right you can essentially implement any self-paying, and self-running corporation as a never-ending complex chain of future problems.<p>(I would speculate that it&#x27;s even possible to build a universal turning machine on top of any bitcoin-style blockchain that can compute any problem off-chain and allow these computations to be proven and self-enforcing but that is a topic for future research.)