Cryptography and evil

I was going to write a blog post about mathematical cryptography problems, like good hash algorithms, getting padding right and other juicy problems and contrasting them to social cryptography problems, like trusting keys and blockchain forking. Then I came across this page on Ethereum problems:

While before cryptography was, by and large, a purely computational and information-theoretic science, with strong guarantees built on security assumptions that are close to absolute, once money enters the picture the perfect world of mathematics must interact with a much more messy reality of human social structures, economic incentives, partial guarantees and known vulnerabilities that can only be mitigated, and not outright removed.

That says it better than I could. However I would also have said one of the underlying problems is evil, such as manifested in a 51% attack (that's about one specific attack, but it applies to cryptocurrency generally). Lots of interesting problems to solve!

Ethereum - for when you get bored of bitcoin

A couple of years ago I started reading up about bitcoin, and I put some of what I'd found into Bitcoin - digging deeper.... Whilst what the effect that cryptocurrency will have on the world is interesting I'm finding the potential use of the blockchain (simply put - a distributed pretty much guaranteed trustworthy ledger) more interesting.

Recently I've come across ethereum, which is building its own blockchain for use with smart contracts, such as making sure musicians get paid when you stream their music. Now I find that really interesting.

Sometimes the PR side of such projects isn't too great, but that home page is really good at explaining what it's all about at a superficial level. There are lots of levels below that though.

More another day, including using technology to overcome evil.