mfukar

mfukar t1_ize32sv wrote

In your opinion, do cryptocurrencies aim to coopt the usefulness of cryptography by incorporating the terminology ("crypto-") in order to gain legitimacy? Why, in your opinion, the same did not happen with distributed systems terminology - arguably the only other scientific field to which cryptocurrencies sparked actual research - which is far less accessible to the public?

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mfukar t1_iwyg4re wrote

No - not all. What most people refer to when they say something like this is public-key cryptography. That is because Peter Shor found an algorithm to factorise an integer efficiently and thus solve the problem some PKI relies on in time that classical computers cannot. What's more fascinating, is that we're approaching quantum computers with enough qubits to examine quantum Fourier transforms, which might allow us to see a realistic, albeit large, implementation of Shor pretty soon.

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