Unfinished Writings from 2022
One off thoughts, crypto kitties, and the evolution of cryptography
Hello Professionally Curious One!
I typically setup with bug audacious goals in writing.
Most don’t pan out.
Here’s a collection of things that just didn’t pan out for me.
Enjoy!
Allen
Past Publications
Sections You Can Skim To
Here’s a collection of one-off thoughts.
Y’all know about Cryptokitties?
Evolution of Cryptography
Here’s a collection of one-off thoughts.
TL;DR: Welcome to my thoughts graveyard where I resurrect them for one more fight.
Governance
Blockchains are governed by DAO’s, and regulated by it’s technical systems
Businesses are governed by organizations (.org), and regulated by technical authorities
People conveniently confuse one for the other to drive their narratives.
Accounting & Finance
Blockchain Data, or as I will call “Protocol Data”, only describes occurrence / existence of a transaction.
This translate to “yes it happened. Unfortunately, I don’t know what happened.”
Accountants & Crypto
Accountants will tell you the relationship between a number and your business. A Crypto accountant will remind you of your relationship between you and the government.
Payments
Only in crypto did we decide to celebrate the simplicity of crypto by turning any payment transaction into the classical transaction pair of Test, and Rest.
Trusts
A trust is a hilarious way to invest into crypto and skip all that paperwork. Provided that you like Gemini.
On Healthcare:
“If US Healthcare had a Cryptocoin, it would be a Deathcoin.” Dr. Alex Cahana
On Economics
“Blockchain is an Economy in Code” - Andy Martin
“Blockchain is really a governance Technology” - Andy Martin
Nobody owns anything
You own “Your crypto” in the same way you own “your stock”. You don’t; it’s “registered” to you by a central record keeping authority, and you get an “entitlement” to it, but you don’t actually get it.
Y’all know about Cryptokitties?
TL;DR: I actually set out to write this piece last year and…just never finished. So now I’m just going to tell you about them.
What is Cryptokitties?
Cryptokitties are what happens when blockchain meets Tamagotchi meets Pokemon. Cryptokitties are the first example of consumer friendly NFT, and at somepoint in time, accounted for 12% of all transactional traffic on Ethereum.
Founded in 2017, Cryptokitties allows you to breed, raise, and trade virtual cat with “unique” genomes. Each virtual kit is unique, similar to real cats, carry its own “genome” that can be breed with other cats to create unique combinations. If this is making you uncomfortable, yet enslaving cute critters with balls doesn’t, well I can’t really help you there.
There are rare cats, and then there are Gen 0 cats (the first cats ever), and those
How does it work?
You buy two cats, each with unique properties.
You bring them together and breed them.
You’ll get a new cat based on the two cats, with a chance to have a mutation which may lead to a desirable outcome.
Evolution of Cryptography
TL;DR: Confuse. Diffuse. And maybe Allen should finish this piece.
Note: This is an unfinished piece. Maybe I’ll revisit it one day. Thanks Peter V. for the trail that led me here.
Origin of Crypt…ography.
Romans had numerals. The Arabic world has zero. Romans didn’t understand zero. The Europeans didn’t know it at first either. The first learning of “zero”, it was called “sifr”. It evolved into “Cifra”, and by the middle ages, the French (it’s always the French) called it “Cifre”. Then the classical English started saying cipher.
A cipher is a fundamental core “algorithm” for encrypting or decrypting things. To understand that, you’ll need to know the evolution of “ciphers”.
But why are cipher important? Well, we are being cryptic about it.
What’s Cryptography?
Cryptography is the practice of sending hidden messages in the presence of enemies. First documented and used by Egyptian Pharaohs of the past (Hieroglyph sometimes have secret messages as known by scribes), and also employed by Romans in the form of the Caesar Shift Cipher, people have been communicating to one another privately with the expectation that a third party wanted to break in and use that information to their own advantage.
Stage 0 - Hieroglyph
Essentially, a specialized alphabet that the common masses do not know.
To be fair, you can send any message, and if your population, and your enemies population, are both illiterate, it works!
Stage 1 - Caesar Shift Cipher
You need a key.
You can send messages in a weird pattern and it requires a requires a key to decode the pattern. Basic form of encoding and decoding. The pattern can be surmised as “move all letters to the right by 3”. Except once it is decoded, every possible message that uses this form of “encoding” are all broken. It’s a one key fits all scenario.
Stage 2 - Steganography
You need a key + the awareness of the exact secret.
Message is obscured and requires a key to decode the pattern.
+ Invisible Watermarking, or embedded messages, were added to ensure any unauthorized individual doesn’t even know the existence of the hidden message.
Stage 3 - Vigenere Coding
You need a lot of keys.
Put into practice in the 15th century, instead of obscuring letters in fixed patterns, variable and maybe random looking patterns were used. Basically, you are going to need more keys to decode it because there is more than 1 pattern used.
Stage 4 - Enigma Rotor Machine
You need a lot of keys, and you need to know what time those keys are valid.
Used in the 20th century, the practice of what pattern you encoded and decoded your message were changed daily with the used of an Enigma Rotor Machine, which is basically a typewriter that illuminates random lights. One side types, the other side receives specific light patterns. The way the pattern matches each other would change daily, requiring extensive knowledge of what pattern would be used on what day.
This would get broken by the Polish folks by WW2.
Stage 5 - Speak Another Language- just make sure it’s not human
You use different sizes keys, and different lock types, to secure your mansion.
Happening in WW2 and onwards, Cryptography shifted from human derived patterns to “excessively mathematical problems”. These were called block ciphers, and they are a fundamental building block to any digital-based security. They essentially needed a one time key that can only be used at oddly specific time, and is done at a “block level” (think of a room in a house - okay now think of a drawer in that house. Bingo. Now open all the drawers across the 52 rooms in the house. Good luck finding all those keys.)
Stage 6 - Computer Assisted Language Coding and Decoding
You different size keys, different locks, awareness of what you are looking for, and the patterns change all the time.
Commercialization of information technology led to the demand for more forms of encryption. That’s capitalist speak for saying banks wanted encryption. In a short period, several standards were issued and iterated upon including Lucifer, Data Encryption Standard, and the currently famous Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). When it comes to securing the network, it’s usually one device that does it.
Stage 7 - Network Assisted Security
Same as above but 10,000 times harder.
We can think of the blockchain in this manner. A network, or an ecosystem, designed to ensure the security of the data it contains and protects. The unique challenge is that you would need to build a machine that can not only solve one mathematical problem, but it can consistently solve every problem that an entire network of machines are using.
Stage 8 - Quantum
I don’t even know what this is.