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The art of encryption, called cryptography, is the way information is secured. Cryptography is primarily the question of: How can Alice send critical information to Bob without Eve being able to decode it? Before the Internet, history has seen many clever ways to encode and send information, followed by clever ways to decipher. Cryptography has also been a powerful force for technological progress: Alan Turing, the father of computer science, was a codebreaker in World War II.
As computers connected to form the early Internet, the network was built to withstand nuclear attacks. However, the early Internet had a flaw, and high school students were able to infiltrate the network as it was unencrypted. So as the Internet develops to connect billions of people today, strong encryption is required to secure an increasingly digital global economy. Unlike the Internet however, the global economy is highly fragmented, being divided into 180 local fiat monetary systems. Building upon the history of encryption and the decentralized Internet, Bitcoin, a native Internet currency has emerged. Bitcoin is the culmination of a powerful technological history.
A long time ago, one of the earliest encryption techniques was used in Ancient Rome. Caesar himself would communicate using a substitution cipher: “If he had anything confidential to say, he wrote it in [substitution] cipher… If anyone wishes to decipher these, he must substitute the fourth letter of the alphabet, namely D for A.” His confidants would agree upon the alphabetic shift…
