[Cryptography] What has Bitcoin achieved?

[Brian M. Waters]

On Mon, 02 Jun 2014 18:10:14 +0100
ianG <iang at iang.org> wrote:
> We've seen this 'marketing-stretch' in other aspects of successful
> crypto systems as well.  Same today with the magic blockchain and PoW.
> 
> Now compare your 32 notaries design.  Where's the light?  The bang?
> Compared to smartcontracts, blockchains, p2p, silk road .. you've got
> nothing.

I'd like to respond to the subject of your email ("What has Bitcoin
achieved?"), moreso than the content...

Last year IEEE published a two-part article called "What Happened to
the Crypto Dream?" on why cypherpunk/Chaum-esque crypto protocols
haven't caught on in the mainstream. He contrasts the relative failure
of those ideas in the privacy realm to the success of encryption and
digital signatures in the security realm:

http://randomwalker.info/publications/crypto-dream-part1.pdf
http://randomwalker.info/publications/crypto-dream-part2.pdf

He cites a lot of reasons, but the one that stuck with me is the fact
that it's so difficulty for laypeople to grasp those kind of protocols.
(See "Human Factors" in Part 2.) It's easy enough for laypeople to wrap
their heads around the ideas of encryption ("scrambling" data) and
digital signatures ("just like on paper"), but to most folks, something
like distributed timestamping *just shouldn't work.* It somehow warps
the mind and defies one's notion of the laws of the universe! As a
result, businesses and lawmakers are less likely to invest in
technology they don't understand, and customers won't buy in because
they can't even understand how it can help them.

One of the most important results of Bitcoin, for me, is that it's
pushing us back the other way. Distributed digital cash is something
that should be *impossible* to most people, and yet it's in the news
every day now. Whether they realize it or not, folks are slowly starting
to understand that this "crypto" thing means more than just scrambling
and unscrambling data.

With this, we might be in a better place than ever to push forward the
so-called "cypherpunk dream" and get some of these technologies into
widespread use, even if we never get to use Bitcoin at the grocery
store.

BW

-- 
Brian M. Waters
Burlington, Vermont, USA
+1 (908) 380-8214
brian at brianmwaters.net
https://brianmwaters.net/
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