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Comment by jxm262 | Hacker News Reader

Here's another simplistic explanation for this concept - http://twistedoakstudios.com/blog/Post3724_explain-it-like-i...

I've been reading alot about the cryptography (and alot of bitcoin stuff), there's alot of interesting material out there.

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Thanks, the Wiki article is complete gibberish to me.

I find this about basically every Wikipedia article on a math topic. They are very precise - but basically completely useless for learning anything about the topic.

Sometimes there will be a Simple English translation for math articles. Here's an index of articles on Cryptography: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cryptography

While not every wiki page has it enabled I find that the simple english really helps my understanding. For ex:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_theory

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standa...

I once edited a Wikipedia article on an Einstein paper to make it much more clear. It was subsequently reverted. I understand the need for brevity, but the domain experts at Wikipedia revert many seemingly irrelevant edits.

The edit I made was to explain how Einstein made the leap to E=mc^2 by including the step that showed how E=mv^2 for particles of a given velocity. Of course this is well known to every engineer and physicist, but the article on the proof was so hard to follow without it.

Note that this explanation is not fair. If Bob stops the protocol when he gets the answer (equal or not) then Alice doesn't learn anything.

In cryptography there are ways to make such a protocol "fair". Basically both learn "bit by bit" the answer, if Bob stops early, he only gets one bit of information more than Alice and if he can bruteforce the rest, so can Alice (except if Bob is the NSA).

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