Unfortunately language isn't a static thing and is somewhat defined by the dominant usage of something over time (unless you're in the rare country that has fully prescriptive language). I had been using crypto as shorthand for cryptography for a long time but cryptocurrency quickly subsumed that. If I talk to any of my non technical friends, and even technical friends who don't touch cryptography, crypto = cryptocurrency. I think the war is lost here.
The bigger problem is for non-technical users "cryptography" and "cryptocurrency" now sound interchangeable. So now you can't have a conversation about cryptography without explaining how it's distinct from the concept of cryptocurrency and that you're not talking about Bitcoin.
While most people aren't talking to their non-technical friends and family about cryptography too often, the co-opting of "crypto" is problematic for companies. They now have to explain to lay people why a new phone isn't pumping out Bitcoin when it was advertised as having strong cryptography. It's going to also be super problematic when politicians start talking about "crypto" regulation and we're having to fight battles over the legality of cryptography again. I don't think my old RSA-as-one-liner still fits.
The worst part is that there is already another word for cryptocurrency. Blockchain. It has the same number of syllables as "crypto" and isn't ambiguous.
The cynic in me says they did it on purpose, because it's widely agreed by non-morons that cryptography is good and important and people wanted to associate their controversial shitcoins with that good and important thing.
> The worst part is that there is already another word for cryptocurrency. Blockchain.
There do exist cryptocurrencies that are not based on a blockchain. For example, Iota is based on a tangle, which the creators of Iota claim is better suited for their intended IoT applications than a blockchain.
Or more centralized cryptocurrencies, for example eCash, which was invented 1983 by David Chaum:
"Centralized cryptocurrency" already has its own word. Banking.
Banking would be better if it worked like eCash, but it would still not be a problem to not have a single word that encompasses both this and Bitcoin, since they are actually two different things.
I talk about encryption which cuts the confusion nicely even if it isn't a perfect replacement but I find lay people don't care about the general field of cryptography they care about privacy and from that, encryption. I've been able to get a few people onto signal for instance by going that route.
People will also deny that Wine is an emulator, and people will also claim that whatever tinc does is not an VPN because it doesnt hide your IP when watching porn. My coworker denied DOS is an operating system because it doesn't have virtual memory and paging.
all nonsense ... People generally aren't good with subtle differences, i guess. I've given up explaining it to people.
I know the old version from memory, but there is nothing in there that say it was ever short for windows emulator. It is quite clear from the history that it was named not emulator since day 1, to emphasize that it doesn't have true emulation layer that will make it slow.
It doesn't have a CPU emulation layer, but that doesn't mean it's not a emulator.
The name always stood for "WINE Is Not an Emulator", I'm with you on that. Self-referential acronyms were extremely fashionable back when WINE started out.
Actually blueflow deleted comment referenced the following interesting link (PDF, page 3) which shows that the acronym came very shortly after the name, seems that the project was named wine very early without concrete meaning, and the self-referential acronym followed soon. As far as I can tell it was never Windows Emulator.
Before wine, there was wabi for Solaris, and wine was implementation of the same idea for Linux. wabi is indeed more correct name, since it is an ABI layer (despite Solaris claim to the contrary, the motives for might be legal reasons).
Frankly, you're reading HN, you can cope with it; a lot of people can't, and do confuse them as adults.
An extreme example - there was a paediatrician murdered (? At least something severe happened) in the UK after a newspaper published his name and occupation in connection with some more mundane story, and some idiot saw 'paed' and assumed all words with that prefix mean the same bad thing, or whatever.
Many people can't reliably tell you whether they bought something in a shop, or brought it home from a friend who gifted it to them.
This is actually my personal approach, because I'm a curmudgeon. If I'm talking about cryptography, I say "crypto". If I'm talking about cryptocurrency, I say "cryptocurrency".
Signatures, hash functions, message authentication codes, zero-knowledge proofs, authentication, etc. are all part of cryptography. They’re not “encryption” no matter how hard you try to stretch that word’s definition.
There are t-shirts, stickers, pins and mugs with "crypto means cryptography" printed on them. This linguistic squabble is so well established that it has merch. But I can't begrudge publications getting an easy bit of writing out.
This fight is over. You knew it was over the second time you were talking to someone you didn't know well, were about to use the term "crypto", and paused to check in your head how they'd interpret the word. "Crypto" means "cryptocurrency", not "cryptography".
We shouldn't be surprised: there's orders of magnitude more people interested in get-rich-quick schemes than in abstract algebra.
The cryptography engineers will be happier the sooner they let this go and find some new slang for themselves.
The "crypto" part of the word "cryptocurrency" is short for "cryptography".
If instead "crypto" is short for "cryptocurrency", then it would follow that "cryptocurrency" is short for "cryptocurrencycurrency", which is short for "cryptocurrencycurrencycurrency", which is short for "cryptocurrencycurrencycurrencycurrency" etc.
I'm just going to stick with "crypto" being short for "cryptography", with an added mental note that the short form is ambiguous. I guess I just don't have the patience to see an infinite recursion through to the end.
You can do whatever you'd like! I'm not saying you need to stop using the word "crypto" the way you've been using it. But the subtext of the merch (and of the article) is that there's a live debate here about it being improper to use "crypto" to refer to Hubii and Cream Capital and Bitcoiin. It's not; the ship has sailed (to the moon!).
May I ask you how you know that? Language is very much dependent on context; social groups, fashion etc. Your experience might not be as universal as you think.
Note that I'm not trying to debate you on the issue, I am just curious about what kind of evidence inspires such as bombastic pronouncement.
I know we're not supposed to post reddit-style "slowclap" comments here, but a mere upvote just could not express my appreciation for this comment. Please carry on the good work.
> This fight is over. You knew it was over the second time you were talking to someone you didn't know well, were about to use the term "crypto", and paused to check in your head how they'd interpret the word. "Crypto" means "cryptocurrency", not "cryptography".
Cryptocurrency implementers understand just fine what I mean. I'm speaking about the actual cryptographers and not the people doing get-rich-quick schemes.
For the rest, I consider continuing to use the term crypto and having them get confused means just maybe that will lead to a test of their faith.
I'm fine with that! What I'm saying is that the concerted effort to roll back Dogecoin's claim on the term "crypto" is doomed; it reminds one of the 1990s effort to reclaim "hacker" from the, err, hackers.
I mean, we're on a site called "hacker news." If any non-technical person looks over my shoulder and sees the title of this site, they automatically think cyber criminal website. Because that's what "hacker" means to a majority of people. Heck, even to a lot of technical people.
"Crypto" is going down the same road. Sure, we know the difference. But most people think "Crypto" is Bitcoin. Period.
Yes, and it’s still noteworthy when it happens and still merits responding with countermeasures (like new terms) to ensure the meaning you want can be efficiently communicated without error.
(Except for the the small part of the population that actively resists such efforts in the belief that they’ll have an advantage over others in correctly guessing the intended meaning, or that those that have a harder time don’t matter.)
"Web" pages are linked together in a way that can be visualized as a web. It's barely even a metaphor. In the context of the article, "crypto" is just a short version of "cryptocurrency." These terms came about through different mechanism.
Yes, that was the time when politicians and managers for some reason suddenly decided to exhume that 90ies buzzword (32C3 press conference montage from around that time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY6KkRsS26M).
And the most irritating part of the redefinition of "literally" to mean the opposite of literally... there's no clear synonym that people can use when they literally mean literally.
Be glad. Misuse of the phrase "beg the question" is like salt in my ears. But I mostly keep my mouth shut as it's a battle hopelessly lost at this point.
I assume you considered a bunch of different perspectives and concluded that one is more correct than the others. I was curious about the reasoning that went into your decision.
I went through that process myself a while ago and came to a different conclusion based on the idea that the meaning of a word or phrase in conversation is determined by what it communicates. I qualify with "in conversation" because there are audiences and venues where that's not necessarily true (like in a courtroom).
It's completely arbitrary, from case to case. To answer your question about "begging the question" I think the concept of "circular reasoning" is important enough to have a cutesy phrase associated with it.
That's interesting. I agree that the concept is important and that's why I avoid begs-the-question. Most of the time it doesn't communicate what you hope it does.
The underlying issue is hinted at towards the end: "cryptocurrency, on the other hand, is a relatively recent development ... that may or may not survive". It is not just that it is being confused with something else, but that it is being confused with something else which (in the eyes of most people in tech, excluding cryptobros) has exceedingly negative connotations. It would be like having the same personal name as a mass murderer.
I'm not happy with "web3" trampling on the history of the semantic web, but what can we in the minority really do? Probably best to just shrug it off.
At the same time as crypto is in the limelight, I'd rather us not forget the lessons of RDF, triple stores, rich schemas, etc. Semantic models were well positioned just as the Facebook/Google platforms were taking off. The platforms just grew faster with VC and ad money.
If we'd have had a distributed/bittorrent moment for sharing our data outside of platforms, we'd have had messaging and news that worked like email. We were really close.
I am finding this article and the comments here very surprising. Do a large number of people actually believe that the word "crypto" means exclusively "cryptocurrency"? Does anyone believe it means exclusively that?
To me it seems similar to how "auto" as a noun is generally short for "automobile", but most people are aware that other things can also be called "auto". When a camera says it is "auto focus" I cannot imagine that any normal person would assume that phrase has anything to do with automobiles.
It is incredibly common for the same word to have different meanings in different contexts. I personally have literally never had a conversation about cryptocurrency in which any person used the word "crypto" to mean "cryptocurrency", so I am clearly out of this loop. But if people decide to use it that way as slang in a certain context it certainly doesn't change the meaning of related words, or even mean it's impossible to use a different slang meaning in different contexts.
I'd say about 90% of people believe that since they don't know cryptography is a thing. Now if you're talking to people that work in tech it's a different story, and they'd probably accept both definitions.
Yes. A large number of people who are not software engineers or mathematicians currently think "crypto" means "cryptocurrency", and don't know what "cryptography" is or think about it at all in and of itself. They think about cryptocurrency a lot, and call it "crypto".
Since there's no other such comments, I'm just going to chime in & say I'm extremely sympathetic.
This is a classic case of confusion, of two things being mixed together & fused, in terminology, when they are distinct areas. Our languages are, as many commenters point out, flexible & changing. But when that flexibility leads to the distinct & clear becoming mixed & hazy, that is usually a loss.
I have to disagree, while it can sound a bit "off" I think it's probably the most natural word to use where gender is unknown or irrevelant. All the other constructs I'm aware of that have been used for this purpose are more of a speedbump than "they", for example replacing "he" with "he/she" or "s/he" rather than "they" is a much more tortured way of achieving the same meaning in my opinion.
I hate that the name of a well-respected technical discipline has been appropriated by a community full of scammers and con-men, but sadly I think this battle has been lost a long time ago.
Cryptographers should be happy about the importance cryptography plays in our world instead of being grumpy about how non-technical people use the word.
I personally significantly benefitted from understanding Bitcoin level cryptography, so I can't complain :)
Crypto currencies are highly controversial. Many see the problems with few benefits. Yes, many speculators got rich but they’ve disrupted supply chains, enabled the ransomware revolution, benefit money laundering, and consume insane amounts of energy. We still do not have that killer use case we were all hoping for with decentralized money.
Bitcoin must be controversial, as it's disrupting much more than the supply chains: the whole global financial system. Nobody knows if it will be successful or not, we need 10 more years to find it out.
Can you imagine a non-controversial or non-volatile way to do it?
They're not controversial right now, they're politicized - people have to agree on the reality before they can start arguing about whether it's good or not. Most of what you stated isn't even epistemically agreed upon, and you're saying we're already in the judgement phase? Of cryptocurrencies as a concept?
JEEZUS. I'm tired of social media. People buy into all kinds of narratives then use them to justify other narratives. It just never ends. Most cryptographers don't care about this at all, except that it brings the cryptobros to their forums, when what they're looking for are trading communities.
If it makes you feel any better, numismatists and coin collectors are not happy about the coopting of the word “coin” either. For millennia a “coin” was a physical item (usually a metal disk) which served as a medium of exchange in commerce. Coins are typically accepted everywhere within the jurisdiction of the issuing authority, and sometimes even beyond if the coin is minted out of a metal with intrinsic value such as silver. (For example, Spanish silver coins were heavily used in the colonial US for more than two centuries. Europeans lived in North America since 1492 but we never minted our own coins until the 1790s.) Coins can also be used to pay taxes to the issuing government which helped maintain these physical coins as acceptable legal tender even when made from base metals carrying no inherent value.
I’m not a cryptocurrency expert, but from what I know it seems like cryptos don’t have any of these useful properties of money. Hoarding and manipulation by speculators coupled with limited opportunities to transact with them make cryptocoins a poor medium of exchange for most people most of the time. Proliferation of competing “coins” reminds me of the wild west early days of paper money where every local bank was printing their own paper but it probably wouldn’t buy you much in the next town over.
Are coin collectors really annnoyed at bitcoin using the word "coin", like you have personal knowledge that this is a common thing coin collectors are annoyed about? Or you're just hypothesizing it for the sake of argument?
They should call them what they are which are “tokens”. But physical tokens are usually understood as a poor substitute for real money (think arcade token you can only spend in the arcade, or subway token for the subway, vs a quarter dollar you can spend anywhere) so I understand why they wouldn’t want to brand it that way.
Once when I was giving a presentation about cryptography just as this whole cryptocurrency thing was kicking off, I titled the talk "Crypto!" without thinking twice about it. I was shocked at the extensive turnout. Who knew so many people liked cryptography? But most people left disappointed. :)
In the US at least, if you get a 4 year degree at university to learn programming, it's almost always the Computer Science program. There are certainly other programs that would fit the bill, but CS is generally the preferred degree.
I was at a mixer recently and talking about digital assets with some other people at the table, I dont even think I said “crypto”, and this person from Amazon bee-lined into a holier than thou crypto[graphy] discussion as if there was ever any confusion. Followed by the distinctly corporate “enterprise blockchain has legs” before continuing their obscure irrelevant cryptography discussion. Of interest to them and not “big ole bad cryptocurrency” not noticing the relative morality of working for an exploitative corporation for decades.
This matches the level of socialization I’ve experienced with cryptographers my whole life.
That ship has sailed, and cryptographers will not regain use of that word at least for some time (maybe forever), best to find a new thing and move on.
I'll bet using the long form 'cryptography' would be ideal.
The crypto- prefix has been used in all sorts of contexts.
In politics, for example, terms like crypto-fascist/crypto-marxist/crypto-Royalist are used in texts from at least the 19th century where the meaning adheres to the original sense of intentionally hidden or obscured.
Edit: a quick look at occurrences of crypto-* from the 19th century shows varied usage from medicine, architecture, and especially religion (crypto-Jesuit, crypto-Protestant, etc).
Other philosophers enjoy watching meatbags trying to communicate through flatulence, delight in the many interpretations a single sound can entail, and marvel at the ensuing chaos.
On one hand, I agree that it sucks that the 'crypto' term has been overwhelmed by hucksters. On the other hand, I'd rather expect cryptographers to either pwn it, or comport themselves with a bit more dignity and call their field what it is: cryptography. You only lost a nickname. Deal.
