While most people aren't talking to their non-technical friends and family about cryptography too often, the co-opting of "crypto" is problematic for companies. They now have to explain to lay people why a new phone isn't pumping out Bitcoin when it was advertised as having strong cryptography. It's going to also be super problematic when politicians start talking about "crypto" regulation and we're having to fight battles over the legality of cryptography again. I don't think my old RSA-as-one-liner still fits.
The cynic in me says they did it on purpose, because it's widely agreed by non-morons that cryptography is good and important and people wanted to associate their controversial shitcoins with that good and important thing.
There do exist cryptocurrencies that are not based on a blockchain. For example, Iota is based on a tangle, which the creators of Iota claim is better suited for their intended IoT applications than a blockchain.
Or more centralized cryptocurrencies, for example eCash, which was invented 1983 by David Chaum:
Banking would be better if it worked like eCash, but it would still not be a problem to not have a single word that encompasses both this and Bitcoin, since they are actually two different things.
all nonsense ... People generally aren't good with subtle differences, i guess. I've given up explaining it to people.
Of course they will, it's even in the name!
Wine Is Not an Emulator
Wine is imitating the windows libary interface. It literally is an emulator: "To strive to equal or excel, especially through imitation".
Wine devs had to to the renaming because people incorrectly read it as "it runs in a virtual machine" for no reason.
> Wine (originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator")
The name always stood for "WINE Is Not an Emulator", I'm with you on that. Self-referential acronyms were extremely fashionable back when WINE started out.
https://wiki.winehq.org/images/5/5c/Wineconf-2018.pdf
Before wine, there was wabi for Solaris, and wine was implementation of the same idea for Linux. wabi is indeed more correct name, since it is an ABI layer (despite Solaris claim to the contrary, the motives for might be legal reasons).
[0] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Embedded_Systems/Common_RTOS/D...
The question then becomes -- since "crypto" no longer means "cryptography" -- what new shorthand term do we use?
Maybe some things simply can't be solved without education & maturity?
An extreme example - there was a paediatrician murdered (? At least something severe happened) in the UK after a newspaper published his name and occupation in connection with some more mundane story, and some idiot saw 'paed' and assumed all words with that prefix mean the same bad thing, or whatever.
Many people can't reliably tell you whether they bought something in a shop, or brought it home from a friend who gifted it to them.