Cryptocurrencies Aren't 'Crypto' | Hacker News Reader

Cryptocurrencies Aren't 'Crypto'

motherboard.vice.com

15 pointsakvadrako8 comments

The basic idea is that cryptographic functions rather than state-sanctioned violence are used to secure the funds.

sure they are, they're very much applications of cryptography, or "crypto". I think this article really means to say that "crypto" isn't just "cryptocurrencies".

btw, a lot of what's called "cryptocurrency" is actually more interesting and complex than just money/currency. some of these applications are focused on gathering and safely encoding consensus from groups of people, using cryptography. that's very crypto if you ask me!

Who cares. Same words are used in different contexts with different meanings.

It can be a bit confusing when the context hasn't first been set-- such as in the titles of links on hn

Real confusing when you first hear the term crypto jew and think it has something to do with bitcoins.

“Most cryptocurrency barely has anything to do with serious cryptography,” Matthew Green, a renowned computer scientist who studies cryptography, told me via email. “Aside from the trivial use of digital signatures and hash functions, it’s a stupid name.”

Trivial use upon which the whole fabric of secure communications is built. Go read a book.

Are you suggesting we start calling secure comms crypto as well?

Secure Comms is already a short name that describes how they work. I fail to see why Crypto is a bad abbreviation for commodities that are based on cryptographically signed and cryptographically verified blocks. Just because the parthenon only uses a small amount of mathematics doesn't mean it's "not a geometric structure" -- it's in math books. I feel like Vice could be picking a better fight than "let's split hairs on jargon" especially when the word crypto is not going anywhere. How about this: Vice news isn't really "Vice"

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