TIL in 1977 the NSA tried to block MIT's public key cryptography research, calling it a modern weapon. 20 yr old Mark Miller secretly copied the paper, shared it nationwide, and told friends: "If I disappear, share this." In 1978, the gov backed down, and encryption went public

/ethereum foundation | opinions are my own but more than likely they come from Vitalik's blog paragraph.xyz/@chaskin

The US government's enacting of export controls for cryptographic keys in excess of a certain size in the 1990s is what got me interested in cryptography in the first place.

Imagine how much societal and technological progress we would have wasted if if public-key cryptography had been kept secret or banned for years

Aviator, diver, Etherean, nexialist, PhD in aviation ∩ climate science | Host of /diving /ethfinance /eth-staker /geopolitics /science /singapore /thomas

Imagine if the Internet had gone the way of packet radio. The original visions for the Internet were supposed to go over packet radio, but regulators made encryption illegal, so it could only ever be used as a toy. The Internet was basically the same way before SSL (1994). E-commerce changed everything.