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

“-How long do you want these messages to remain secret?[...]
+I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“One must acknowledge with cryptography no amount of violence will ever solve a math problem.”
― Jacob Appelbaum, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

“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

“Even though we don't know which companies the NSA has compromised – or by what means – knowing that they could have compromised any of them is enough to make us mistrustful of all of them. This is going to make it hard for large companies like Google and Microsoft to get back the trust they lost. Even if they succeed in limiting government surveillance. Even if they succeed in improving their own internal security. The best they'll be able to say is: "We have secured ourselves from the NSA, except for the parts that we either don't know about or can't talk about.”
― Bruce Schneier

“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

“Modern technologies are 99 percent bravery , and 1 percent investment”
― Arif Naseem

“Understanding block-chain makes you go mad, unless you start your own cult”
― Arif Naseem

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Without blockchain there can be no educators.”
― Arif Naseem

“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

“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