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Comment by r053bud | Hacker News Reader

For real though...when will we stop using crypto to refer to cryptocurrencies? Crypto is short for one thing and it's cryptography.

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Crypto used to exclusively mean cryptography. Cell used to exclusively mean unit of living matter. Language evolves, and it's the popular culture that decides meanings. Cryptography isn't as popular as cryptocurrency. I don't know what you expect to gain by holding on to a definition losing the language war.

So many people being very pedantic about it these days.

This sentiment comes up in almost every crypto thread and I think it's a bit misguided. It's referred to as crypto because...that's how people know it.

Google trends explains my point better than I ever could.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

It also shows that this conflation is very, very recent. I assume this is either because some people realized that there is "more than bitcoin" now, so you can't keep saying "bitcoin" and mean all the cryptocurrencies, and they just thought "jeez, cryptocurrency is such a complicated word. Let's just use crypto!"

In any case, crypto has been established as short for cryptography for far longer than any of these currencies existed. It is used in this way as a distinguisher in many contexts (e.g. crypto-phones, crypto-locker, crypto protocols, ....); calling "crypto-X" just "crypto" is unnecessarily ambiguous.

(either...or it's some guys pushing their agenda very hard in the last few weeks)

However you feel about it, the change is happening. People clearly don't think the ambiguity is as problematic as you do.

What makes you say that? Neither is it inevitable, nor do people not care, as is evident by that literally every time an article using this term the wrong way is posted, people will post clarifications what the article is actually about and express their annoyance regarding the issue.

Clearly, people do actually care about others trying to coopt well-established language for their often fishy schemes.

Yes, a small number of people do care about this -- how many comments are these compared to the ones that are discussing the topic itself?

All I'm saying is: If you're going to try to tell people to not change the language as people seem to want to change it, because you don't want the language to change, then prepare for complaining for a long time with no results.

The point is even more dramatically illustrated if you zoom out further and show 2004-present, assuming your point is that "crypto" as a contraction of "cryptocurrency" is extremely recent; the usage is less than a year old, and therefore likely to confuse those of us who have been using "crypto" as shorthand while discussing "cryptography" for multiple decades.

(Perhaps linguistic coherence is more than we should expect from the cryptocurrency community, given that they have already inflicted upon themselves the utterly bizarre usage of "blockchain" as a mass noun.)

like when cyber started to become slang for sex while online.

it has probably happened through out history where well established names get hijacked when something else get picked up by the general population. e.g.

hacker vs cracker.

drones (rc helicopters vs pilotless aircraft).

Anecdotally, I once had someone on facebook randomly start berating me over the use of the word "trans", because I was being disrespectful. I was of course talking about transmissions/gearboxes, but this fact was lost on that person.

also: broadband. It originally contrasted with narrowband, and they describe modes for propagation of light through fiberglass cables... I thought it was really weird when I heard people on mainstream radio discussing such things. Eventually I realized they were using broadband as a synonym for 'fast internet' :P

> It originally contrasted with narrowband

I agree with your wider point, but the antonym of broadband in networking context is actually baseband.

'Narrowband' is a good example of a word that came into use to fill a perceived gap in the lexicon. A gap which didn't really exist, but the word became more widely used because it was not challenged by people who should know better.

Another example is 'bandwidth' which has so many colloquial meanings now that it is unusable in any general context. It's just a collection of letters that can mean anything you want. Also 'hacker'.

This is not the evolution of languge, it is its destruction. Overloading words with so many contrary or ambiguous meanings that language fails at its primary purpose of conveying meaning and intent.

If you think that's bad, just wait until you hear about the word "sanction"!

Crypto comes 'from Ancient Greek κρυπτός (kruptós, “hidden, secret”).'

The meaning of words is what people understand them to mean. Policing language so people use it as you think they should has never worked very well.

> Crypto is short for one thing and it's cryptography.

Says who?

DJB: http://cr.yp.to/

DJB is not an authority on abbreviations. They are decided colloquially.

I'm sure there's a name for this phenomenon. We shouldn't be calling remotely piloted quadcopters drones either, but "drone" has become a modern colloquialism for any UAV that isn't a remote controlled hobby plane.

I imagine this is one of the ways in which language evolves, for better or for worse.

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