In Praise of Cryptography

This essay is a work in progress. For now, it is a loose collection of notes and half-formed thoughts.

Just a few fun notes for an essay, that I might write someday.

• Cryptography for humans is mostly solved. We don’t really authenticate anymore, we just expect our machines to do it for us.
• One click on Netflix probably executes mathematics that would’ve looked like science fiction a hundred years ago. Nobody notices. That’s kinda beautiful.
• Electricity became invisible once everyone had it. Security feels like it’s headed the same way.
• I think I like cryptography because some part of me would rather trust a mathematical proof than a human promise.
• Laws change. Markets change. Companies die. Mathematics seems to have a much longer half-life.
• Maybe cryptography isn’t really about secrecy. Maybe it’s just the study of how strangers can cooperate.
• “Don’t trust, verify” is usually said as a slogan, but I wonder if it’s actually one of the defining ideas of future civilizations.
• AI agents probably won’t think cryptography is “expensive”. A protocol that annoys a human today might just be another function call for them.
• Weird thought: theoretical cryptography papers from today might become engineering manuals for AI systems 100 years from now. Maybe it’s about asking: what is the minimum amount of trust required for civilization to function?