A note from Daniel

Blockchains are "crypto" not because they enable anonymity (they don't) but because they're based on a mathematical breakthrough from the 1970s called public key cryptography. The main thing to know about public key cryptography is that it lets multiple parties who have never before communicated perform cryptographic operations with one another. The two most common operations are (1) encryption, which encodes information so it can only be decoded by the intended recipient, and (2) authentication, which lets a person or computer sign information, proving it's authentic and actually came from that source. When people describe blockchains as crypto, they mean it in the latter sense of "authenticated," not "encrypted."

Daniel Read Write Own, page 62 · March 1, 2024 Save to shelf
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