The elephant in the room is monetary properties, not technical ones. It's very simple, for tier 1 monetary assets:

Good crypto = Public Blockchains
Bad Crypto = Obscrued Blockchains

For higher order tiers (backed money, e.g. Bitcoin CT), obscured blockchains are acceptable.

So you should therefore be discussing the merits of Good/Bad crypto within the domain of Public Blockchains explicitly or Good/Bad crypto within the domain of Obscured Blockchains explicitly since they are distinct monetary domains and obscured blockchains do not have any native (unbacked) monetary properties in the first place - even if it is "good crypto".

It would seem that you actually do not understand what cryptography is in the modern sense.

A fundamental nature of information is that it wants to be freely copied everywhere to everyone. That any bit is equal and indistinguishable from any other bit of the same value and that any bit is eventually known to all who care.  Cryptography is all that technology by which we hope to confine and constrain the nature of information, to put up fences and direct it to our exclusive purposes, against all attacks and in defiance of the seemingly (and perhaps actually) impossible.  Digital signatures are cryptography by any modern definition and utilize the same tools and techniques (for example, a DSA signature is a linear equation encrypted with an additively homorphic encryption), and suffer from most of the same challenges as the message encryption systems to which you seem to be incorrectly defining cryptography as equivalent.  Moreover, the use of digital signatures isn't the only (or even most relevant) aspect of cryptography in cryptocurrencies-- e.g. the prevention of double spending of otherwise perfectly copyable and indistinguishable information in a decentralized system is a cryptographic problem which we address using cryptographic tools, and-- like all other practical cryptography-- achieve far less than perfect confidence in our solution. As are more modest ends like interacting with strangers but not being subject to resource exhaustion from them.

Far more so than other sub-fields of engineering, cryptographic systems are doing something which is fundamentally at odds with nature and share an incredible fragility and subtly as a result (and perhaps all are failures, we have no proof otherwise).

A failure to understand and respect these considerations has resulted in a lot of harmful garbage and dysfunctional software.

This thread is moving pretty quickly (ten pages of mudslinging in half as many hours!) so I'm not sure you'll see this, but there's an important misunderstanding here. You're right that the human beings aren't cryptographic (e.g. the development team, market participants, etc) --- though it's important to observe that this makes them very unsuited to cryptographic functionality. gmaxwell had an elegant description of cryptography as "technology by which we hope to confine and constrain the nature of information" despite information respecting no ownership, borders or morality. He described this as "inherently subtle and fragile", which it is, but this indifference to political and social pressure also make it efficient (human trust is expensive to build and maintain!) and robust against a lot of political and social pressures that human systems are not. This robustness is the cypherpunk motivation for bringing cryptography into everyday life: anything we have the technology to do cryptographically rather than socially ought to be, since social systems can change quickly and unjustly. Nowhere is this more true than finance, so cryptocurrency is a perfect environment for this kind of thing. So cryptocurrencies try to eliminate human decision points wherever possible, and where not they try to set things up so others can't override each others' decisions (hence the value implied by buzzwords like "decentralization" and "censorship resistance" and "public verifiability").

I'm not entirely clear on what masternodes do these days, but I infer that their actions affect users' privacy, i.e. they are "confining and constraining" information. This is a cryptographic function too. Human decisions may factor into their behaviour, but they are still performing a cryptographic function; human involvement does not change this, only changes the failure modes.

All this to say that basically the entirety of cryptocurrency really is cryptography. Even many of the human parts. The network transport is part of the cryptosystem: it needs to be designed to prevent modification of data in transport, authentication of data even when endpoints are anonymous and spoofable, etc. A wallet is part of the cryptosystem: it's responsible for creating verification keys ("scriptPubKeys" in Bitcoin, which are usually abbreviated to addresses) whose corresponding private keys are controlled by the correct parties to the correct extent, and for correctly and securely storing these keys. Wallets are decoupled from the main cryptocurrency cryptosystem, and in particular are not part of the hard part --- consensus code --- but they are certainly cryptographic and are subject to the same sort of subtle missteps as other cryptosystems. (For example, the oft-cited BIP32 "bug" where a party in possession of a public key and chaincode can derive the secret key from a non-hardened child secret key; it would not be hard to come up with a plausible-sounding system which "unintentionally" exposed secret data through this mechanism.)

I'll repeat my above statement: basically the entirety of cryptocurrency really is cryptography. This is important. It's why things are so subtle, why complexity is dangerous, and why changing even trivial-seeming things can have drastic and hard-to-analyze consequences. This is where "a lot of harmful garbage and dysfunctional software" comes from. It's the default for poorly-thought-out systems. And in cryptography, "poorly thought out" means anything less than expert cryptographers spending large amounts of time and effort designing things to be both correct and clearly correct. (Given how few experts there are in the cryptocurrency space, I could tell you that almost all of it is shit just by the pigeonhole principle .)

This is not a cheap standard to hold a system to even if its designers want to; and falsely claiming that something is not cryptographic is an easy way to excuse not wanting to. But such claims do not change reality.


This is simply false.