The tech thing outside of crypto bro bullshit that got me interested in Polkadot is some "math inventions" in the distributed computing.

If you distribute block generation let's say by N in a blockchain you easily end up to an architecture where also network security also divides by N.

What Polkadot and its spec generalization JAM (https://graypaper.com/) do differently is that with the help of game theory parallel chains balance back in collaboration.

The basis of all this is described in this math paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/961

With these shenanigans, the network sort of creates a scheme where you have a distributed computer where the relay chain is actually just part of the overall machinery tracking the history.

What I personally work on is a RISC-V relative bytecode VM called PVM, which has eight registers instead of 16 and immediate ECALL. This speeds up JIT over let's say WASM or eBPF given that register allocation to ARM and x86 becomes much more straight-forward process and generally it is more close proximity of those CPU architectures. I.e. what I hack is essentially a software-defined compute core and overall this network forms a sort of like "GPGPU" infrastructure.

The value part is more to optimized to book keeping than increase investor value so that you can make shared services where everyone gets their part when being a sub-provider of some service. E.g. there's no fixed number of tokens but there's instead rate-limited inflation.

So yeah, I'm not interested in blockchains or cryptocurrency per se but I'm very interested on distributed systems and providing alternatives to a data center. I think this make this work valuable.