Slashdot Mirror
Cryptocurrencies Aren't 'Crypto' (vice.com)
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, writing for the Motherboard: Lately on the internet, people in the world of Bitcoin and other digital currencies are starting to use the word "crypto" as a catch-all term for the lightly regulated and burgeoning world of digital currencies in general, or for the word "cryptocurrency" -- which probably shouldn't even be called "currency," by the way. For example, in response to the recent rise of Bitcoin's price, the CEO of Shapeshift recently tweeted: "don't go into debt to buy crypto at these prices." "Crypto Stocks Rise," read a headline on Tuesday from the trade publication Investor Business Daily. But the financial blog Seeking Alpha outdid them all by publishing a post titled "Tales From The Crypto." Excuse me, "the crypto" what? As someone who has read and written about cryptography for a few years now, and who is a big fan of Crypto, the 2001 book by Steven Levy, this is a problem. "Crypto" does not mean cryptocurrency. The above are just three examples picked at random, but if you don't believe me, just search "crypto" on Google News or Twitter. On the internet, "crypto" has always been used to refer to cryptography. Think, for example, the term "Crypto Wars," which refer to government (originally the US government) efforts to undermine and slow down the adoption of unbreakable communications systems. By the way, the book Crypto isn't about Bitcoin. It's about cryptography, and more in particular, about the cryptographers who fought the government in the so-called Crypto Wars.
We would benefit from just calling everything "cyber" and replacing hashtags with AOL keywords.
Any more than we were able to convince the marketing shitheads that a GB is 1,073,741,824 not an even 1,000,000,000
Maybe we can do something like was done to differentiate like Gigibyte vs Gigabyte? Cripto instead of Crypto?
Or Bloodto instead of Cripto? ;)
If you get outside your bubble and use a dictionary, "crypto" refers to "a person who secretly supports or adheres to a group, party, or belief." Neither the prefix crypto- (from the Greek kryptos - hidden) nor the shorthand crypto are exclusively owned by cryptographers, who themselves misappropriated it from it's (former) definition.
If you want to mean cryptography unambiguously, just say cryptography. But don't complain when someone else uses crypto as shorthand. Pot, meet kettle.
And, there's nothing wrong with calling them "cryptocurrencies," they're a medium of exchange based on cryptography.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
My lack of understanding makes me react in strange and silly ways.
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
Also, why do we park on driveways, and drive on parkways?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Do u cyber?
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Your nations tax officials are going to find that amount and start asking questions.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Cryptocurrencies are neither crypto, nor currencies. Discuss.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I do not understand how a bunch of drinking glasses is capable of writing an article. This is so confusing! I think that the author is actually a person, but that doesn't make sense! The word "bicchierai" has always referred to plural drinking glasses, which is a slightly non-standard plural of "bicchiere" by the way. This person is not even a singular drinking glass, and as someone who has used drinking glasses for many years now, this is a problem! The author shouldn't even have the name "Bicchierai"!
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Kryptocurrency is just nerdspeak for dogecoin.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This must be the weekly Pedant day.
A whole story on how Crypto Currencies are not cryptography.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
If there are 20 people at the party whose names all start with 'Pat', that seems reasonable.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Ah, I'm gonna cut the cryptographic community some slack here and say they get to put their foot down... after all we already stole "code" from them to now mean software.
Someone had to do it.
Inflammable means flammable? What a country!
// This is not a sig.
"As someone who has read and written about cryptography for a few years now, and who is a big fan of Crypto, the 2001 book by Steven Levy, this is a problem."
Right here is the author's true gripe - but he knows no one will care about something this trivial and stupid, so he writes an entire article attempting to convince himself and others that there's an actual reason other than his silly little snit.
#DeleteChrome
... you lost what you had.
Look at "floppy."
Yes, the very early removable storage was floppy, but when the rigid 3.5" drive came out, they were listed in Hardware Devices as "floppy."
Look at "google," a verb meaning, "to search."
"Crypto," will mean what the masses decide it will mean.
Those who object will be labeled, "crypto-nazis."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Surely "Kryptocurrency" is copyrighted and trademarked by DC Comics.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Appers are gonna app.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
We'll make ourselves a new culture, with blackjack and hookers.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I don't understand either of those things to mean what you say they do. So they absolutely do not mean that. Fun game, this.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I would have thought it was a play on the name of an old TV series, based on a quick Google search for "Tales from the Crypt," which just sounded like it would exist. So, maybe the problem is not understanding interesting writing.
Cryptographers like the meteorologists screaming STOP --- Clouds are these formations of moisture and dust in the sky, they have NOTHING to do with hosting, and Cloud Computing is one of the most obscene utterances ever. Too late.... too late.
Because good headlines need to be short and clever.
For those who don't remember or know Tales from the Crypt:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
What about Peer-to-Peer currencies?
If there are 20 people whose name start with "Pat", there's a good chance several of them will be named "Patrick". What kind of party is that anyway? The anuual meeting of "People named Pat, Chris, or Sam"?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
If there are 20 people whose name start with "Pat", there's a good chance several of them will be named "Patrick". What kind of party is that anyway? The anuual meeting of "People named Pat, Chris, or Sam"?
With a name like "Pat" you never know...
If there are 20 people whose name start with "Pat"...
"Pat" was the example that AC gave, so I used it. There are more ways to complete "Crypto-*" than there are "Pat-*". I didn't think I needed to explain that.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
there are a lot of words that don't mean what they used to:
"crypto"
"drone"
"AI"
"president"
-Styopa
So it's nothing to do with cryptohashes?
the word 'cloud' and there is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer.
its called code when its published and pushed on users with more than a few zeroday and other bugs.
if it ever reaches maturation/testing to be bug free then it can claim to be a program.
But they're definitely hypsto and hypesto.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hack / Crack
Ah yes, the most headbangingly desperate marketing failure since that vain attempt to get people to pronounce Canoe Men's Cologne "Can-no-way."
Given that what you do with these things is give money to an exchange that will steal from you, I propose we call them kleptocurrency.
. . . this into plain English:
"Wah, wah, wah, language usage changes and I can't make people talk my One True Way."
Somebody change subby's diapers.
PC, supposed to mean personal computer but it's synonym with Windows these days.
Lag, supposed to mean network latency but gamers use that word to describe a low frame rate.
Etc.
Fight all you want, if there's 100K people saying it right and 50 million people saying it wrong then it's the wrong usage that will stick.
#DeleteFacebook
1 GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes (1,953,125 512-byte sectors) of usable capacity plus 73,741,824 bytes of spare space for remapping up to 144,027 worn sectors.
Don't expect media and the markets to use the officially approved nerd dictionary.
Calling a police officer a cop was once a derogatory remark, you see how that one worked out.
any number of fascinating quirks of Indian Standard English
Do any of these quirks involve needing a techneecian to remove each and every wirus from your Vindows dextop?
Or more specifically, someone else's farm of rapidly provisionable partitions of computers.
It's called GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux. Why won't you fucking call it GNU/Linux.
- rms
Cause that's encryption and from the code provided by Phil Zimmermann's PGP.
The general public has never before misused a technical term. Surely this heralds the end times.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
John discusses his recent book, Words on the Move, in the following podcast: John McWhorter on the Evolution of Language — August 2017
So, too, can 'crypto' be dismembered.
The podcast wasn't my favourite episode. It was a bit too strawman for me, perhaps because I already know this material fairly well.
We just finished watching an older Coen film, A Serious Man. For a quantum physicist who can infallibly fill chalkboards with bra–ket notation without hardly blinking, he sure does gape like a clueless fish when he discovers his wife is capable of forming alternate plans.
Words are like wives. Just when you think you've got it all sorted out ... change happens.
Within a week or two it won't be 'crypto' any more ...
it will be cleverly reduced to 'crip'; far more hip.
But that will annoy the LA street gang called 'the Crips' and may lead to mayhem.
Thus a slight turn of term to 'crap', which will stick, as crap tends to do;
causing future historians to struggle to understand the odd term.
...omphaloskepsis often...
You 'merkins have been corrupting the English language for decades, and this habit of shortening a word to its otherwise widely-used prefix annoys me on a regular basis.
What is a 'semi' ? I had to look that one up.
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
T Reginald Gibbons tried to clarify the difference in this memorable article
http://adequacy.org/stories/20...
Best thing about it is the comments from l33t h@x0rz who couldn't spot the whole thing was designed to troll them. Good times, man. Good times.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I have crypto, get over it already. And yes, it is real money. It is a currency. Now go find a real job.
Good luck with that. The masse's shape language.
Requiem for the American Dream
Cryptographic Currency... It's just shortened to Crypto... Chill Out y'all “I used to be with it, but then they changed what ‘it’ was, and now what I’m with isn’t it. And what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary to me.”
after all we already stole "code" from them to now mean software.
As usual we are in the dim twilight of Poe's Law here, but just in case you were serious: no, no we did not. "Code" does not exclusively mean "secret code", and is not solely the domain of cryptology.
Etymologically, "code" means simply "writing" or "book". As a term of art, its use for systems of formal expression, and documents using such systems, is at least as old as its cryptological use.
Dudes who creep on post-pubescent but under 18 girls are pedophiles.
Folks who hate gay people but aren't even slightly afraid of them are homophobes.
People use the word "anymore" in place of the word "currently," anymore.
And apparently, now "crypto" means "funky internet money," not cryptographic keys, or a prefix to the word "jew" meaning "pretending not to be one."