Vitalik Buterin is Right

Historically, encryption technologies have always been the preserve of the powerful.

But in the 1970s and 1980s, mathematicians at Stanford and MIT made a series of breakthroughs that made it possible to encrypt messages so that only the intended recipient could read them. And also impossible to break (decrypt) by even the most powerful computers.

This new technology, known as “public key cryptography” or “asymmetric cryptography”, is based on a private key known only to the user, and public keys related univocally to it.

These two keys are mathematically related in such a way that only the recipient of a message can decrypt with his private key a message addressed exclusively to him. And only he can sign the messages associated with his public key.

In a world that would otherwise be heading towards total loss of #privacy, with massive databases controlled by government and corporations, this technology proved revolutionary. And its #cryptography happens to be one of the pillars of another technology running on top of it: #Blockchain.

Very few apps like Telegram or Signal incorporate this type of #encryption. But all of them are being pressured by governments in order to access users’ conversations.

When all governments (Western, Russian or Chinese) agree that they don’t like encryption, it is because encryption is good for citizens. This makes news such as the lastest one from V.Buterin good stuff.

“A low-tech approach to add a significant amount of privacy to the NFT ecosystem. So you would be able to eg. send an NFT to vitalik.eth without anyone except me (the new owner) being able to see who the new owner is.”

There´s still hope !