Cryptography Quotes

“here’s a toast to Alan Turing
born in harsher, darker times
who thought outside the container
and loved outside the lines
and so the code-breaker was broken
and we’re sorry
yes now the s-word has been spoken
the official conscience woken
– very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted –
and the story does suggest
a part 2 to the Turing Test:
1. can machines behave like humans?
2. can we?”
― Matt Harvey

“Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-travelling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, unstable moods, and episodes of psychotic mania and depression. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit any “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the ‘Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’). Newton also wants to publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to explain the laws of motion governing the universe. But his literary agent explains that he can’t get a decent book deal until Newton builds his ‘author platform’ to include at least 20k Twitter followers – without provoking any backlash for airing his eccentric views on ancient Greek alchemy, Biblical cryptography, fiat currency, Jewish mysticism, or how to predict the exact date of the Apocalypse.

Newton wouldn’t last long as a ‘public intellectual’ in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say ‘offensive’ things that get reported to Harvard and that get picked up by mainstream media as moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from academia, social media, and publishing. Result? On the upside, he’d drive some traffic through Huffpost, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s Laws of Motion.”
― Geoffrey Miller

“When we pair modern tech like Blockchain technology, cryptography and data analytics with the ancient practice of bartering, a lot of business opportunities emerge.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Adaptive collective action is superior to bureaucracy.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.”
― Edward Snowden

“Cryptographic tokens can be used as tools of stigmergy to incentivize good behavior and decentivize bad behavior in the context of business systems.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“The enemy knows the system”
― Claude Shannon

“One of the most singular characteristics of the art of deciphering is the strong conviction possessed by every person, even moderately acquainted with it, that he is able to construct a cipher which nobody else can decipher. I have also observed that the cleverer the person, the more intimate is his conviction.”
― Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher

“You’re British, you’re a priest, you’re a medical doctor, you can handle a rifle, you know Morse Code, and most importantly of all, you’re a fucking pain in the ass – so off you go!”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy. Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a
totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the true name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive rerouting of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.”
― Peter Ludlow, Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias

“Not afraid of heights - afraid of widths.”
― Thomas St Germain

“I describe Bitcoin as "a digital version of gold" eGold.”
― Arif Naseem

“A little bit of math can accomplish what all the guns and barbed wire can't: a little bit of math can keep a secret.”
― Edward Snowden, Permanent Record

“Anyone who tries to create his or her own cryptographic primitive is either a genius or a fool. Givent the genius/fool ratio of our species, the odds aren't very good.”
― Bruce Schneier, Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World

“I pressed him gently on the matter, but he seemed a little reticent, which is maybe what you’d be wise to expect from a cryptologist who was also a practicing hermeticist.”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“One cartographer does not only understand how to analyse cryptography by old times.”
― Petra Hermans

“Those who believe in Bitcoin also believe in cleverness.”
― Arif Naseem

“Bitcoin is calm creation is revolutionary.”
― Arif Naseem

“The bar for preemptive protection is being raised, and it's here — somewhere in the raw and turbulent nature of Internet autonomy, that the purest forms of the revolutionary Cypherpunk agenda can be revived.”
― Jacob Riggs

“A court order is as ineffective at accessing encrypted data as a nuclear weapon. Only the keyholder can access that data, and that power resides exclusively with them.”
― Jacob Riggs

“The salient and undeniable truth about cryptography is that no measure of violence or proscriptive legislation will ever solve a math problem.”
― Jacob Riggs

“Crypto-anarchy is unforgiving of crypto-apathy.”
― Jacob Riggs

“Learn about blockchain instead of going to college. You'll gain a whole lot of valuable information that would change your life.”
― Olawale Daniel

“Anyone who tries to create his or her own cryptographic primitive is either a genius or a fool. Givent the geius/fool ratio of our species, the odds aren't very good.”
― Bruce Schneier, Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World

“All digital or virtual currencies apart from cryptocurrency are centralized, with the control vested in the central bank and other government agencies.”
― Olawale Daniel, Mastering the Crypto World: Understanding and Trading Cryptocurrencies for Profits

“Not everyone has adopted cryptocurrency, majorly because not many understand what it is or how it works.”
― Olawale Daniel, Mastering the Crypto World: Understanding and Trading Cryptocurrencies for Profits

“Looking at cryptocurrency as an asset, we can say a cryptocurrency is a form of digital or virtual asset securely encrypted based on decentralized networks distributed across several computers. It is only available in digital forms.”
― Olawale Daniel, Mastering the Crypto World: Understanding and Trading Cryptocurrencies for Profits

“Cryptography creates artificial scarcity in a universe that defaults to abundance”
― Gun Gun Febrianza

“Cryptography exists because information asymmetry is survival.”
― Gun Gun Febrianza

“And this all fits very well with the modern way of thinking about stuff in which all you need to do, in order to attain a sense of personal accomplishment and earn the accolades of your peers, is to demonstrate an ability to slot new examples of things into the proper intellectual pigeon-holes.
But the gap between demonstrating the vulnerability of a cryptosystem in the abstract, and actually breaking a bunch of messages written in that cryptosystem, is as wide, and as profound, as the gap between being able to criticize a film (e.g. by slotting it into a particular genre or movement) and being able to go out into the world with a movie camera and a bunch of unexposed film and actually make one.”
― Neal Stephenson