Since the popularity and adoption of cryptocurrencies began, the prefix “crypto” has been using worldwide to define any concept. Where the hidden or covert feature is add to the root word. This, in turn, contributes to the meaning of the new word for example, cryptocurrency, crypto asset, crypto art, etc.
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What is Crypto?
Crypto is a shortening of the word cryptography. According to the RAE (Royal Academy of the Spanish language), crypto. From the Greek κρυπτός – “cryptos,” means hidden or undercover.
Why Crypto?
Cryptocurrencies are digital accounting books that store the information of the network participants and the balances or units that are assign to each of them.
These units can be exchange between the same network participants and function as a value exchange mechanism.
In creating and exchanging each of these units. Mathematical methods are use to ensure that no one participant in the network has more authority than the others when defining the authenticity of their records.
Cryptography is crucial to ensure that this value exchange system is decentralize and does not require a trust third party to guarantee the legitimacy of transactions.
A Brief History of Cryptography
Cryptography is ancient and can be said to date back to ancient Egypt or more than 4,500 years ago. Although in those initial uses, it is not guarantee that it was use to communicate a secret message, but rather as a method of adding some mystery.
In the 20th period, with the advent of mechanical and electrical devices, it was use to encrypt messages by the Germans. Who invented the Enigma machine during World War II.
Thanks to the enigma, the Germans could transmit messages indecipherable to the enemy on open communication channels. Moreover. Their decryption or keys changed every day, so just having another machine wasn’t enough.
Today it is known that Alan Turing create a mechanism that allow breaking the encryption of the enigma mechanism. Which is said to have help reduce the duration of the war by two years, thus saving millions of lives.
Beginnings of Modern Cryptography
In the 1970s, Rivets, Shamir, and Adelman, three computer scientists, create an encryption algorithm known today as RSA. Which laid the foundation for many known and use encryption mechanisms today. As asymmetric cryptography.
In the 1990s, American cryptographer David Chum founded Digi Cash, a company that researched digital value exchange systems. One of his flagship projects was cash.
However, despite being a digital value exchange system, it did not work without a trusted third party. As a result, it only aroused the interest of banks and start-ups in the technology world that later ceased to be interest in it.
In 1998, a computer scientist named Wei Dai published an article called b-money, outlining what would become Bitcoin 10 years later; a digital value exchange mechanism that does not require a trusted third party.