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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

There are t-shirts, stickers, pins and mugs with "crypto means cryptography" printed on them. This linguistic squabble is so well established that it has merch. But I can't begrudge publications getting an easy bit of writing out.

This fight is over. You knew it was over the second time you were talking to someone you didn't know well, were about to use the term "crypto", and paused to check in your head how they'd interpret the word. "Crypto" means "cryptocurrency", not "cryptography".

We shouldn't be surprised: there's orders of magnitude more people interested in get-rich-quick schemes than in abstract algebra.

The cryptography engineers will be happier the sooner they let this go and find some new slang for themselves.

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The cryptography engineers will be happier the sooner they let this go and find some new slang for themselves.

This reminds me of Michael Bolton in Office Space being angry at the musician with the same name.

"Why should I change? He's the one who sucks!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI1NfFExOSo

The "crypto" part of the word "cryptocurrency" is short for "cryptography".

If instead "crypto" is short for "cryptocurrency", then it would follow that "cryptocurrency" is short for "cryptocurrencycurrency", which is short for "cryptocurrencycurrencycurrency", which is short for "cryptocurrencycurrencycurrencycurrency" etc.

I'm just going to stick with "crypto" being short for "cryptography", with an added mental note that the short form is ambiguous. I guess I just don't have the patience to see an infinite recursion through to the end.

You can do whatever you'd like! I'm not saying you need to stop using the word "crypto" the way you've been using it. But the subtext of the merch (and of the article) is that there's a live debate here about it being improper to use "crypto" to refer to Hubii and Cream Capital and Bitcoiin. It's not; the ship has sailed (to the moon!).

> It's not; the ship has sailed (to the moon!).

May I ask you how you know that? Language is very much dependent on context; social groups, fashion etc. Your experience might not be as universal as you think.

Note that I'm not trying to debate you on the issue, I am just curious about what kind of evidence inspires such as bombastic pronouncement.

Dictionaries numerically number definitions for the same term to denote multiple contexts

I’d buy a shirt that says “Crypto means Cryptozoology” but I haven’t seen one yeti.

I know we're not supposed to post reddit-style "slowclap" comments here, but a mere upvote just could not express my appreciation for this comment. Please carry on the good work.

> I haven’t seen one yeti.

This doesn't mean they don't exist.

> This fight is over. You knew it was over the second time you were talking to someone you didn't know well, were about to use the term "crypto", and paused to check in your head how they'd interpret the word. "Crypto" means "cryptocurrency", not "cryptography".

Cryptocurrency implementers understand just fine what I mean. I'm speaking about the actual cryptographers and not the people doing get-rich-quick schemes.

For the rest, I consider continuing to use the term crypto and having them get confused means just maybe that will lead to a test of their faith.

It reminds me of my conversation with my daughter about the meaning of meme. I bring up Richard Dawkins and she brings up imgur. :)

Even Bruce Schneier is still annoyed about it seemingly: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/11/crypto-means-....

I think there's room for both, and it can be figured out from context, usually.

I'm fine with that! What I'm saying is that the concerted effort to roll back Dogecoin's claim on the term "crypto" is doomed; it reminds one of the 1990s effort to reclaim "hacker" from the, err, hackers.

Alternately, they can hold on to their slang, and use the differing meaning as a tribal signifier.

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