It represents one of the biggest disruptions in human history.
Nowadays, everybody, from a Wall Street broker to your corner baker knows what a cryptocurrency is. The word has been spreading about the fortune some people have made by betting on cryptocurrencies, since the surge of Bitcoin’s price in 2014. Since then, the industry has evolved rapidly; myriad of different currencies are now available, more and more people are investing, and private companies are eyeing the usage of the cryptography in their business processes. Who knows, maybe the next sponsor of such technology might be governmental or institutional. To comprehend how such enthusiasm is possible, it is important to understand the underlying technology.
Cryptography is defined as the method of encrypting a process in such a way that no one else but the accredited parties have access to it. In a nutshell, it is the art of hiding something from someone. Do you remember the round wooden box Tom hanks tries to solve in The Da Vinci Code (2016)? It recalls one of the oldest cryptographic techniques know to date, the cipher. Over the ages, the cryptographic techniques have evolved to guard secrets, as was Enigma. The Nazi machinery used that technology to transmit orders from the Reich around the world. Although both encryption techniques have been cracked to unveil their deepest secrets, the newest version of the cryptography, blockchain encoding, is theoretically, and as far as experience has shown, unbreakable.