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Comment by brosirmandude | Hacker News Reader

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=...

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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.)

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