With the crypto hype, where is the actual crypto?
With big ICOs taking down the Ethereum network and a lot of people making a lot of money (did anyone say "bubble"?) everyone is jumping onto the crypto hype. Major news outlets writing front page articles, everyone with a but of money buying crypto currencies. But where is the actual crypto, as in cryptography?
iOS and Android full device encryption, Facebook adding PGP, and WhatsApp end-to-end encryption have been great gains for cryptography use on a large scale, but usability has won from best crypto practices in some ways. Safer messengers like Signal are gaining steam (see what I did there?), but have nowhere the acceptance of WhatsApp or Facebook have.
When it comes down to hardcore security and encryption best practices, like storing your own private keys, there isn't anything like PGP. I'd love to write more about encryption and would love feedback on what you think about PGP, encryption and if it even has anything to do with cryptocurrencies.
You can download my PGP key here or find me on Keybase
There are some currencies that focus heavily on the privacy aspect. The ones that come to mind are Monero, Dash and Zcash. They each tackle the problem in different ways, but ultimately they all have the goal of disallowing anyone from seeing the sender, receiver, or amount of a given transaction.
These protocols are also, last I checked, looking to enable normally sent transactions along their blockchain as well, but it's still their main focus to preserve your ability to be the only one fully aware of your actions.
I think these are all necessary, and it seems like IOTA also has some means of maintaining privacy, but I'm not sure how heavily anonymous The Tangle keeps its users. I wouldn't be surprised to see one or two coins experiment soon with a privacy-focused coin using a tangle instead of a blockchain, should IOTA gain steam.
We'll just have to see.
Those are actually the coins I'm most interested in, Dash is the only one I don't own or don't know that well. I didn't even know it was also privacy centric.
What I'm thinking of mainly is encryption of data and messages, which is where PGP and end-to-end encryption come in.
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