Crypto as in Crypto
I’ve ranted against crypto-means-bitcoin since I first heard it. But the last few days have me wondering if we, the greying and already-grey cryptographers, should just accept it. At the very least, when prominent VC Fred Wilson keeps calling it crypto, we have to realize we are losing the battle very rapidly.
100 years ago, cryptography was mostly secret codes. It’s become a lot more than that over the last 40-50 years. It’s public-key encryption, signatures, identity-based crypto, deniable encryption, homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, secure multi-party computation, program obfuscation, … and yeah that’s a lot more than Blockchain, even if Blockchain is a fascinating and novel combination of techniques in its own right.
Think of a transaction, any transaction, be it financial or data, where a trusted third-party mediates interactions between participants who don’t fully trust each other… now think of doing it without the trusted third-party. That’s cryptography. Don’t have a perfectly honest courier who can confidentially and securely transport your private messages to your friends? You probably need public-key encryption and signatures. Don’t have a perfectly honest vote counter whom you’re willing to trust with the tallying of your election without anyone else verifying? You probably need some kind of secure multi-party computation, possibly implemented with physical processes like sealed ballot boxes and statistical audits.
