Cryptographers Fight To Keep Crypto Prefix: We All Have Hills We’re Ready To Die On | Crypto-currencies

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The stadium that houses the Los Angeles Lakers is changing its name: the Crypto.com Arena. The name reflects the Arena’s new sponsorship deal with a Singapore-based cryptocurrency trading platform. This may be good news for cryptocurrency fanatics, but maybe not so much for another faction in the digital landscape: cryptographers.

Look up the word crypto in the Websters Dictionary and you will see that it refers to cryptography, which in turn is defined as the computerized encoding and decoding of information. Search for crypto on Google, however, and you’ll see a slew of better results pointing to cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum.

This lexical shift has taken a heavy toll on cryptographers, who in recent years have repeated the rallying cry Crypto means cryptography on social media. T-shirts and hoodies trumpet the phrase and its variations; there’s a website dedicated solely to clarifying the matter.

For decades, crypto has been used as a shorthand and as a prefix for things related to cryptography, said Amie Stepanovich, executive director of the Silicon Flatirons Center at the University of Colorado School of Law and creator of the T-shirts. pro-crypto, which have become a hit at conferences. Indeed, in the term cryptocurrency, the prefix crypto refers to cryptography.

This is often a losing battle, and it seems to have played out in the case of crypto.com itself.

As of 1993, as the Verge reported, the domain crypto.com was owned by Matt Blaze, a crypto expert who repeatedly rejected potential buyers even as the rise of cryptocurrency meant he could have won millions of dollars.

I think calling cryptocurrency crypto is a bad choice, with bad consequences for both crypto and cryptocurrency, he tweeted in 2018. Ultimately, however, the domain was sold, and now if you go to Crypto.com you will see a giant video from Matt Damon which indicates that investing in cryptocurrencies is about as brave as climbing an icy cliff or exploding in the ‘space.

Still, there remains an internal feud between connoisseurs of word technology.

As Parker Higgins of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, who has spent years involved in crypto activism, pointed out, the crypto crowd is by nature deeply invested in precision, after all, designing and cracking codes is a business where if you get things a little wrong it can blow everything up.

There are global debates both over crypto, for example, over whether chat services should offer backdoors that bypass encryption, and over the regulation of cryptocurrency. It is necessary to distinguish between these two areas to avoid absolutely predictable confusion, said Stepanovich, a particular problem when it comes to lawmakers and regulators who are not always subject matter experts in these areas, even if they are responsible for supervising them.

Higgins agreed. Crypto as a shorthand for cryptography was really widespread. You could talk about crypto even on Capitol Hill and people would know what you were talking about that really had a lot of it in there, forgive it, but currency.

And in an age when many still don’t know what cryptocurrency is, confusion over the terms only complicates matters. Strong crypto is the cornerstone of how people talk about privacy and security, and it’s been under attack for decades by governments, law enforcement and all kinds of bad actors, Higgins said. For its advocates, confusion over terminology creates another challenge.

Stepanovich acknowledged the challenge of opposing the trend, but said the weight of the story was on his side. The study of crypto has been around forever, she said. The best-known code is known as the Caesar cipher, referring to Julius Caesar. This is nothing new. Cryptocurrency, on the other hand, is a relatively recent development, and it isn’t ready to give in to a concept that may or may not survive government regulation.

She remains invested in the language debate because it is so closely linked to politics. Allowing people to develop and use encryption is extremely important for protecting human rights, privacy, and the foundation on which cryptocurrency was built, Stepanovich said.

We all have hills we’re ready to die on, it could be mine.

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