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You say its no harder, but the risks are higher.

A lot of crypto is unintuitive.

And the goal-posts keep moving. You have to keep well-read and very objective.

You can say this about mainstream programming, but its a bit of a stretch. There is plenty of mainstream programming using the equiv to bubble sorts and nobody should care. You can get away with being a bad programmer.

Because the risks are higher, and you can't get away with being mediocre, is why crypto is hard.

PS: not a tarsnap user, but love your work and your thoughtful posts :)

People using bad algorithms is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of. People write horribly broken code in every context; but instead of a bug making software slower than it should be, when an "equally dumb" bug happens in crypto code it probably reveals your keys.

I'll grant you that. Crypto is just one aspect of the security field that doesn't seem very intuitive to me, but it's probably just me.

Based on how many security issues the internet has seen from developers that try to roll their own crypto: it's not just you.

Well, you do understand how to write proveable programs. Most programmers do not.