You're entitled to your opinion on that, I suppose. As someone who actually does understand most of the jargon (because it's what I do for a living), data availability sampling feels to me just as inherent to good blockchain design as fast fourier transforms are to good digital signal processing.

> consensus algorithms are complicated but they solve a hard problem

Ironically, this article is about an algorithm that comes to consensus on and distributes data. Yes it's a hard problem, thus the article.

This is not really an article about cryptocurrency or monkey jpegs, it's a nitty-gritty article about the design of a computer protocol, written for the benefit of protocol researchers and implementers. If it's nonsensical to you, perhaps consider that you're not the target audience.

> perhaps consider that you're not the target audience.

I literally said, "I realize this post is the High Priest of Ethereum preaching to his disciples" before going on to laugh at his gibberish.

It's fine if you're into this stuff, but the cryptocurrency people can't seem to decide if they're a bunch of nerd hobbyists or the Future of Finance.

If you want to be HAM radio, then fine, nobody except your club needs to understand or care what you're talking about. If you think you're going to upend the world economy and force all the rest of us to use your bullshit, then you better expect the rest of us to demand explanations in plain English.

I could tell my grandma what TCP/IP is and why it's important. Cryptocurrency proponents have been trying (and failing) to do the same to me for over a decade now.

> the cryptocurrency people can't seem to decide if they're a bunch of nerd hobbyists or the Future of Finance

I think it's strange to take a diverse set of people from around the world, from hobbyists to open source developers to fortune 500 teams, and group them all together as "cryptocurrency people", as if they represent a united movement towards a single goal.

It's as if I said "those Linux people can't decide whether they want to be nerd hobbyists or the future of server computing" while pointing out the seeming contradiction between Red Hat Linux and Hannah Montana Linux, both produced by the same "group" of "those Linux people".

Or it's as if I compared a unicycle to a fighter jet, both made by "those vehicle people".

> If you want to be HAM radio, then fine, nobody except your club needs to understand or care what you're talking about.

It doesn't matter much what I want it to be. It just is.

I find it unorthodox to compare a software standard to a "club". I'm imagining someone refer to the worldwide group of Linux users as a "club". Much like Linux, I don't need to explain to the world how cryptocurrency works in order for it to be useful to me, nor do I consider myself part of a club for using it. It's just there and I use it. As Andreessen Horowitz said many years ago, "It’s becoming like air or water. It just is, like it or hate it. It just is."

> If you think you're going to upend the world economy and force all the rest of us to use your bullshit, then you better expect the rest of us to demand explanations in plain English.

I don't know where you're getting this adversarial tone from. Nobody was or is "forced" to do anything. This is not "me vs you". We're commenting on a post about a piece of software.

It seems to me like you're trying to defend something or express some deeper frustration, and I'd be curious to know what it is. To you it's not just a piece of accounting software, is it? This software must represent some ideological point that is dear to you.

> I could tell my grandma what TCP/IP is and why it's important. Cryptocurrency proponents have been trying (and failing) to do the same to me for over a decade now.

This really seems to me like it goes far beyond jargon. Are you perhaps frustrated that cryptocurrency's continued adoption conflicts with your world view that it is unimportant? That's not necessarily something I can help with, beyond saying something trite like "each individual person has their own reasons for adopting a technology" or "there's some kind of social aspect that nobody has really been able to properly measure" or simply "protocols can be sticky".

I mean, it's a technical piece of code (ETH, that is), and every new piece gets a new name. It's not a more complicated terminology than you'd get for compilers or protocols - TCP wikipedia has "TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets " which has 6 (or 5, depending how you'd count it), technical terms. They're not very abstract, sure, but it's just TCP, and we think that's completely normal.

A logic class will suddenly try to teach you "eqvuilance relations", "Equivalence class", "Quotient set", "Projection", "Kernel" (Specifically in the Eqvuilance relation meaning), "partition", and that's only the terms I found in wikipedia. The class I help along has one more under this subject, and this is a first semester topic that is taught in a few weeks. All of those are technical, and all of those build on some other technical terms such as relations, functions, sets...

I concede that crypto has a bad naming scheme. It all sounds silly.

I can explain TCP for a general audience: "TCP is the primary system computers use to talk to each other over a network these days. All the data is broken down into tiny little bits called 'packets' and sent out over the wire. TCP is important because it specifies how the computers should perform 'handshakes' at the start of the conversation, and includes rules for checking the data for errors, and resending corrupted or missing packets."

I know (more or less) what Ethereum is, and I understand (more or less) that these 'blobs' are yet another attempt to work around the fundamental inefficiencies inherent when trying to make a giant distributed system for ideological reasons (rather than a small centralized system).

Inefficiencies aren’t really inherent if they can be worked around.